The sky clears at about the same rate as caffeine clears my head—a transitory state, no doubt, and host to a mob of crows.
Year: 2022
Deep blue sky. It’s quiet. A chipmunk dashes across the icy snowpack as I catch up on news of the war.
Deep blue sky; blindingly white ground. A crow lands at the woods’ edge and clears its throat. A Cooper’s hawk flutters off like a fast moth.
Drizzle falling on an inch of sleet: the ground is white again. A pileated woodpecker’s hollow toc toc toc.
A leaden sky slowly lightening toward midday. A wintry mix is coming and the birds know it: juncos in the driveway swallowing tiny stones.
Unseasonably warm and overcast. Up in the woods, squirrels nose through leaf duff newly liberated from the snow. A few drops of rain.
Gray with occasional showers. Distant crows. The face that I can’t unsee in the big red maple trunk with its expression of perpetual dismay.
Sun shining through thin, high clouds. An inversion layer turns the rumble of a freight train into something I can feel in my chest.
Clear and still. The stream has subsided from a roar to a babble: one inmate instead of the whole asylum. The first, skinny clouds.
A flash mob of snowflakes rushing this way and that. Over the sound of water, the wind: all hiss, no hush.
Windy and cold after last night’s freakish warmth. Up in the woods, a large coyote trots across the threadbare snowpack. The wail of a train.
A crow and a Carolina wren take turns issuing three-beat calls, as if debating: CawCawCaw. TeakettleTeakettleTeakettle. It starts to rain.
A clear start to a day due for clouds and warmth. A chipmunk races over the snow, tail like the hand of a timer that just went off.
I love these frigid mornings with their gift of silence. The stream gurgling out from under my yard. Nuthatches. Wren. A distant screech owl.