Bright and cold. Echoing off the ice, the back-and-forth love notes of pileated woodpeckers bashing their heads against dead tree limbs.
Month: February 2019
In the blowing snow, a mixed flock of winter birds drifts into the currant bushes, trailed by the resident jay and his one rusty note.
Snow mixed with sleet like a good cop-bad cop routine: the reassuring suggestion of starting over with a clean sheet, that menacing hiss.
Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I watch a chipmunk awoken from hibernation racing from covert to covert through the inch-deep snow.
Cold and still. The clouds thicken so slowly, it’s impossible to say in which minute the sun goes in. A crow gives a single, strangled cry.
Bright sun, bone-chilling wind. The hillside has lost its white blanket, which makes it feel even colder. The clouds are again worlds apart.
Last night’s torrential rain has given way to wind, sunlight shimmering on the flooded stream and the waxy leaves of mountain laurel.
The creek is high and loud. I try to film the fog but it retreats. The sky appears behind the trees as if blinds had just been pulled.
Cold rain; the snowpack is in tatters now. At the top of a locust snag, a gray squirrel’s tail waves and twitches like a mad flag.
Small clouds rise from the decaying snowpack and drift off through the trees. In the yard, a vole’s tunnel system is beginning to emerge.
The snow has gone slushy, turning the hollow from a soundproof room into an echo chamber. Over the traffic noise, a junco’s cadenza.
Patches of bare yard dug up by deer. Patches of blue sky which the sun now and then pops through. The drip drip of meltwater from the roof.
The sound of two trains approaching a crossing at the same time—their unplanned duet. I study the tracks in the yard, looking for groundhog.
Snow fine as fingerprint powder; it’s almost zero. Two cardinals and a jay in the crabapple tree wait their turn to drink from the spring.