Last night’s torrential rain has given way to wind, sunlight shimmering on the flooded stream and the waxy leaves of mountain laurel.
2019
February 7, 2019
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.
February 6, 2019
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.
February 5, 2019
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.
February 4, 2019
The snow has gone slushy, turning the hollow from a soundproof room into an echo chamber. Over the traffic noise, a junco’s cadenza.
February 3, 2019
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.
February 2, 2019
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.
February 1, 2019
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.
January 31, 2019
Through my thick hat I can hear wind hissing in the pines, the moan of an amorous squirrel, a tree popping from the cold—loud as a gunshot.
January 30, 2019
Take one polar vortex. Add westerly winds, seasoned lightly with snow. Stir in some birds and trees. Heat with a star 93 million miles away.
January 29, 2019
Another snowfall. The small hole in the yard that leads to an underground stream remains open, like a breathing hole for seals in sea ice.
January 28, 2019
The fast scrabbling of claws on black locust bark: another squirrel’s in heat. Dead grass blades along the stream are rococo with hoarfrost.
January 27, 2019
Trees at the woods’ edge with their branches out to catch all the light they can—or in this case, snow. A pileated woodpecker’s flaming cap.
January 26, 2019
From under the house, rabbit tracks encircling a half-eaten raspberry cane, raccoon tracks going straight to the stream—muddy on the return.