A fresh dusting of snow: winter’s not done with us yet. But the chipmunk who lives in the stone wall next to the porch is up, poking around under the lilac, racing across the yard.
Month: February 2025
Hard rain at daybreak easing off into fog. The ground under the trees is still more white than brown. The voices in the creek have increased from a symposium to a convention.
A sky of pastel colors occasionally graced by a bleary sun. Strings of non-migrant, local Canada geese fly low over the trees, restless, their cries still full of elsewhere.
Heavily overcast with a steady drip of snowmelt. From one valley, the sound of trains; from the other, a killdeer. A snow goblin left by the plow topples over into the road.
Contrails fading to white after sunrise—toppled columns from a ruined temple. Three bugle notes from a lone goose. The dull roar of traffic.
Clear at dawn, with the bright crescent moon inching teeth-first through the treetops. A mourning dove plays a downbeat rooster.
The sun! A robin answers the Carolina wren as a pileated woodpecker hammers away at a hollow black walnut tree.
Gray skies and a bitter wind. Snowflakes keep finding the open book in my lap; I sweep them off with a glove before they can vanish into the ample whitespace surrounding the text.
An hour after sunrise and the squirrels are mostly back in their burrows. Weak sunlight on a snowfall fine as flour. A mourning dove calls.
Cold, thinly overcast, and very quiet. The spot where the sun must be glows like a yellow door among the ridgetop trees.
Deep cold at dawn. Icicles hanging from the eaves bend this way and that. The trees creak and groan. The chip, chip of a cardinal waking up.
The winds that buffeted the house all night have mostly retreated to the ridgetop—a distant roar. A few, yellow-bellied clouds add their scattered flakes to the windblown snow drifting atop the ice. I hear my mother on her back porch yelling at the squirrels.
Daybreak finds each twig and weed encased in a quarter inch of ice. Every five minutes, another crack or crash from up on the ridge. The fog thickens.
A faint shimmer of precipitation from a leaden sky. The vole in the yard is gathering more bedding. A white-throated sparrow sings once and falls silent.