Monday December 21, 2020

Solstice. The porch is littered with scraps of paper from the old hornets’ nest—a prized spot for wrens to spend long winter nights.

On this date

A vast Sunday-morning silence broken only by mourning dove wings, the soft taps of a downy woodpecker, and the grumbling of my stomach. …

Patchy gray sky. A red-breasted nuthatch alights on a tulip tree limb stripped bare by a porcupine, a few bast fibers flapping in the wind. …

Snow flurries. A raven croaks, and I scan the sky for it without success, spotting instead an old bird's nest at the top of a walnut tree. …

Under a white sky, the small white car of the meter man, and a heavy frost. Two nuthatches are having a frank exchange of views. …

In the steady rain, a gray squirrel is climbing all over the big tulip tree, as if searching for something. A raven goes croaking overhead. …

A curtain of drips from the season's first, thin snowfall. The sun comes out from behind a club—an autocorrected cloud with a dark history. …

Birds forage on the back slope during a break in the rain, the gray juncos among the rocks and the scarlet cardinal in the barberry bush. …

It's warm. Filmy-winged flies drift past the porch. A flock of geese arrows low over the house—the wft wft wft of their great wings. …

The lilac is alive with chickadees, sparrows, and a Carolina wren stropping his bill on a twig. He flits to a high perch and begins to sing. …

Crows and ravens squabble over deer gut-piles in the woods. Dirt flies at the woods' edge as a groundhog enlarges the entrance to its den. …

That first snow still cloaks the frozen earth. When the wind dies, I can hear the 75 finches at my parents' birdfeeder, a twittering bedlam. …

Steady sift of snow whitening every twig. But my eye is drawn to the one small patch of lawn grass left in the yard, those brave green tips. …

Juncos gather on the gravel driveway, replenishing their gizzards with grit. Up and down the big maple, it's squirrel kabuki, love and war. …

Two nuthatches trade insults from adjacent trees, yelling through their noses like warring doormen in their blue-gray livery. …

The Morning Porch