The western ridge shines golden against dark clouds for a few minutes before the sun goes in. A gunshot. The gurgling of the stream.
Year: 2018
Thick fog, returning to the forest its foreignness—the sense that any sound could be a footfall, that the rain is a many-legged beast.
Sky heavy with weather. In the woods, more bare ground than snow. Brightness persists only in scarlet barberries and the fresh green moss.
Cloudy but bright. I notice many of the pits in the old snow, melted down by oak leaves, have acquired new snow and a second, upstairs leaf.
Bitter wind, its shifts and cross-currents discernible in wide-spaced flakes. A chickadee’s call: the one for putting rivals in their place.
Light snow powdering my black sleeves. I watch a nuthatch inspect each branch of a walnut, its sideways hop and dip when it finds a morsel.
Fog moves back and forth over the snow as the rain thickens. Two hunters emerge, a girl and her grandfather—blaze-orange among the gray.
A slit in the gray clouds widening to reveal the sun, like a sudden eye. Goldfinches feasting in the crown of a birch become silhouettes.
The trees are turning silver and beginning to droop with the weight of freezing rain. A few juncos, undaunted, are bathing in the stream.
Sunlight brightens as the thin clouds move off. Icicles begin to drop from the eaves, their shattering more elegant-sounding than any glass.
Clear, cold and very quiet, expect for bird calls and the trickle of the stream. Since I’m late in rising, a leaf has taken my seat.
A singing contest between white-throated sparrows. Newly fallen oak leaves skitter back and forth on the snow under the trees.
Colder than yesterday, but also brighter. Just as the sun comes out, a snow flurry blows in, silencing a nearby crow.
In my left ear, the sound of traffic going through the gap. In my right, white-throated sparrow, nuthatch, raven, jay. It looks like rain.