The cloud ceiling briefly switches to faint pastels: sunrise. One yammering nuthatch and, from down in the hollow, a screech owl’s soft trill.
2023
December 30, 2023
Overcast at dawn. A cold kiss—snowflakes in the air. When the sunrise comes, it’s only evident in the caws of crows.
December 29, 2023
Mostly clear at sunrise, but clouds gather in the east before the sun tops the ridge. A pair of ravens go over with a new word: two syllables, starting hoarse and ending clear.
December 28, 2023
Sun almost shining through the fog. A winter wren warbles from the marsh. Up by the garage, bluebirds. It feels like March, with December light.
December 27, 2023
Thick fog and silence. A song sparrow pipes up just before sunrise. It gets darker again. A bluebird warbles as the rain resumes.
December 26, 2023
Rain tapering into mist and drizzle. A squirrel finds a black walnut next to the road, swiftly de-husks it and carries it away. The sky brightens. A goldfinch lisps a single note.
December 25, 2023
Heavily overcast, with nothing to distinguish the sunrise from any other moment, soft and gray as old felt in the nearly complete absence of human noise.
December 24, 2023
A few degrees above freezing, heavily overcast, and dead quiet apart from the spring’s low gurgle. A bluebird sings two notes and lapses back into silence.
December 23, 2023
Silhouetted against the dawn sky, a squirrel forages for birch seeds right where Venus was last seen, glimmering through thin clouds.
December 22, 2023
Half an hour till sunrise. The sky’s gray matter is deeply furrowed. The caroling of a Carolina wren briefly dispels the gloom.
December 21, 2023
The solstice dawns cold and overcast, with a small lens of clear sky on the eastern horizon. A thin, wavering song from the meadow: the first white-throated sparrow has woken up.
December 20, 2023
Clear as a bell and cold as a well, notwithstanding which the brown mountain is beginning to show through its thin blanket of snow.
December 19, 2023
Well below freezing, with a half-inch of snow on the ground and a wind that keeps turning the pages of my book. The sun appears for a second or two through a gray eyelid of cloud.
December 18, 2023
Wind seasoned with drizzle in the pre-dawn darkness. Between gusts, the distant whine of tires. A tree limb cracks, but no crash.