Two downy woodpeckers tapping back and forth. The sun almost comes out. Someone is out walking on the crusty snow—the crunch of their boots.
Year: 2020
As slowly as the sky cleared yesterday morning, today it returns to white, like the growing blankness in my memory where some face had been.
Quiet save for water gurgling under the yard. Small patches of blue sky slowly merge. The sun comes out to a burst of goldfinch notes.
Back from the south to cold air, to old snow sagged and wrinkled. Mingling with traffic noise, the voices of non-migratory geese.
Sunrise: a glimpse of yellow from beneath the lid of clouds. Goldfinches flutter down to drink from the stream’s thin fissure of open water.
Classic January morning: clear sky, very still, very cold. A lone crow’s harangue. The furnace stopping in mid-rumble as the power goes out.
Clear and bitter cold (-11°C) but also fabulous—the icy snow covered with glitter where the sun stripes it, blazing through the trees.
Watching snowflakes, I start to wonder whether any are making it to the ground at all. Are they just the same flakes circling the house?
A lull in the snowfall and the yard is alive with juncos, hopping around each clump of dried grass, gleaning their second breakfast.
Clear and cold. As the sun climbs higher, the blue deepens. Yesterday’s thin snow clings to the porch floorboards when I try to sweep.
I find my chair where the wind left it at the far end of the porch with a cracked back. Dried cattail leaves flap like banners for the dead.
Slow winter dawn: light leaking through the trees. A Carolina wren’s molto vivace prompts his mate to respond in sforzando.
Cold and gloomy. A raven alights on a squirrel nest at the top of an oak near the woods’ edge and settles in for a minute before flying on.
Quiet except for the distant whine of traffic on I-99 and some small bird chirping behind the oil tanks. The sun comes out for five seconds.