Friday August 30, 2019

Dave Bonta August 30, 2019

The air is autumnal and smells of cigarettes. My partner talks politics in her night clothes. The rose bush is covered with new buds.

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Clear and bitter cold (-11°C) but also fabulous—the icy snow covered with glitter where the sun stripes it, blazing through the trees. …

Storm past, the temperature is plunging, just as they predicted. The new icicles aren't even done dripping. They sway in the bitter wind. …

Just above freezing but it feels like a day at the beach—sun on white sand, a steady breeze, the surf-like hiss of pines, a jay for a gull. …

Blue jays jeering in the steady rain. In January. One more thing that doesn't feel right on a day when the world is out of joint. …

Two degrees below freezing, and the sky an almost uniform white except for a wrinkling in the east, like the brow of a corpse. Two crows. …

Brown patches in the yard where deer have pawed the snow aside to eat myrtle. An oak leaf curled like a stillborn spirals down from the sky. …

The sound of the wind up on the ridge mingles with the sound of trains in the valley until it's almost impossible to tell them apart. …

Cold—the porch floorboards pop under my feet. Real snow at last! The rising sun stretches two faint fingers across the driveway. …

Juncos hop on the icy snow between the cattails where a rabbit disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, taking the darkness with it. …

Cold and clear at sunrise. Two ravens following the ridge croak in unison, their wings almost touching. A squirrel descends the springhouse. …

Clear and cold at dawn, with a crescent moon tangled in the treetops. A tiny white prayer flag flutters from a branch: some vacant cocoon. …

Very cold. The woods seem unusually lifeless, and there's a new creaking sound with every breeze. After a while, I realize: no squirrels. …

The Morning Porch/Patio