A slow, rhythmless dripping from the top roof. The oak leaves scattered across the snow have only melted themselves the shallowest of pits.
Year: 2018
Where the stream fans out beside the springhouse, birds hop down the snowbanks and into the water to bathe: sparrows, juncos, Carolina wren.
Truly an autumn snow: eight inches with a topping of fallen oak leaves. In the green and brown lilac, a house finch’s purple breast.
Falling snow infiltrated by sleet—that clicking like a room full of typists. A jay has sole custody of the color blue—his two-note solo.
Two degrees below freezing. The sun is a bright smear in what could be a snow sky. A chickadee sings seemingly to itself.
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
A few, tiny patches of snow linger behind clumps of dead stiltgrass. The sun blazes through the thinning crown of an oak; I start to sneeze.
Over the rumble of my furnace, the cries of tundra swans: a long, trembling thread of them high in the blue, wings sparkling like snow.
First snowfall of the year—a quarter inch. Newly fallen oak leaves roll across it, or scuttle like crabs on their curled lobe-tips.
A sudden fusillade of sleet. Just audible over the rattle: a blue jay doing its imitation of a red-tailed hawk.
All the most supine stiltgrass has grown white fur in the night. Two nuthatches foraging at the woods’ edge react badly to my sneeze.
It’s morning in America, and I’m looking at a deep blue sky and a hillside of oaks—rust-red leaves still hanging on. They glow in the sun.
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.
The big dead elm has collapsed into the stream, its rain-slick bole broken in two places. A drenched phoebe hawks insects in the grass.