An icy wind; the ground has regained its white quilt. It’s as if the thaw never happened—except for the odd leaf skittering across the snow.
Year: 2018
Rain has erased the snow. High in a black locust, a squirrel is biting off twigs and carrying them into a crotch, building a bed of thorns.
Warm enough to read outside. I look up to see a midge drifting toward the snowy woods. I look up again and it’s turned into a silent bird.
Mackerel clouds above then across the sun like a face consumed by worry lines. The caws of a crow echo off the thawed and refrozen hillside.
Just above freezing, but if feels balmy. Meltwater drips from the roof. A junco bathes in the slow, dark water of the stream.
Cold snap over, fine snow falls—accompanied by the roar of traffic, as if all noise this past week had frozen solid and now is thawing out.
A squirrel in the treetops pauses before it leaps, gazing, and loses its nerve. Below, bars of sunlight stretch across the pale blue ground.
Another brutally cold morning. From somewhere under the house where the heating ducts run, the trilling of a Carolina wren.
0℉ with a wind. Over the creaks and moans of the trees, I can just make out the muffled cries of gray squirrels engaged in courtship.
Snow in the air, and on the ground, a flock of snowbirds: hopping through the deer-scraped patches, dropping down to the stream to drink.
Deer came in the night and dug up half the yard to get at the evergreen myrtle. Sun pours down from a cloudless sky. A song sparrow sings.
Another frigid morning. Clouds thin and wispy as frayed silk drift off, and the trees’ long shadows turn sharper and darker blue.
Trees and dead weeds alike have grown a fine fur of hoarfrost. There’s no human noise for nearly ten minutes. Then a distant military jet.