Under a low, dark cloud ceiling, the echoing call and response of two mourning doves. A quiet gurgle from the stream. Not a breath of wind.
Year: 2020
Warm sun, soft shadows. Two red-bellied woodpeckers: one trills, the other rasps. I think of Ecclesiastes: “But the earth abideth forever.”
An almost-out sun slowly erases the morning’s hoarfrost, except on the stream banks, where ferns of ice still hang over the dark water.
Cold, with an icy breeze that creeps under both my hoods. A dusting of snow. The distant sound of a door slamming shut.
Sunlight filtered through thin clouds looks somehow warmer than it is. Silence embellished by the resonant knocks of a pileated woodpecker.
Under a leaden sky, rain-fattened patches of moss between the trees are the brightest things. A passing shower’s patter on dead leaves.
The sun peeks through a hole in the clouds, turning the drizzle into a feathery shimmer—visual equivalent of the finches’ endless warbling.
Eyes shut to the strong sun, I watch the shadow-flicker of meltwater dripping from the eaves, the icicles letting go like vestigial tails.
A half-inch of wet snow blew in so fast, it’s plastered to the sides of trees in lumps. From up on the ridge, the white noise of the wind.
Fog. Trees reduced to their most elemental architecture: an outline, a few brush strokes, nothing. Antagonists to an invisible woodpecker.
Sky gray as the skin of a corpse. An internal combustion engine’s profane orison. Some small bird hammering at the seed of a sunflower.
Unseasonably warm. The first half of a song sparrow’s song. Two titmice in the crabapple swipe their bills back and forth on their branches.
Sunny and warm. The snow is reduced to patches in the woods. In front of the house, a Carolina wren shrieks abuse at my brother the birder.
A fresh half-inch of snow: the pleasantly arrhythmic dripping of meltwater on the porch roof. Three Vs of geese go fluting overhead.