A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
January 3,
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.
After another cold, windy night, might the ground finally be frozen? A tree wails in the darkness. From the ridgetop, long sighs.
Hard rain beginning to ease by late morning. Chirps and twitters become audible. The last patches of snow line the road like litter.
Snow sky. Sparrows move through the meadow. A squirrel climbs a witch hazel, seemingly to verify that its pods have expelled all their seeds.
Light rain. Fog forms up on the ridge and drifts down through the trees like a ghost army, loud with the sounds of traffic.
My partner and I argue about whether the dull gray sky looks slightly bluer between the ridge-top trees. I coin the word “hablucination.”
Deer came in the night and dug up half the yard to get at the evergreen myrtle. Sun pours down from a cloudless sky. A song sparrow sings.
Steady rain. Two drenched birders walk up the road, towels draped over their binoculars, and tell me they’d managed to flush a barred owl.
A pause in the sleet. It’s plenty cold enough for snow, but all we get is this glassy grit. A pileated woodpecker whinnies up on the ridge.
The croak of a raven followed by a tree popping in the cold, loud as a gunshot. A chickadee flits through the branches of a birch, singing.
Sparkles on the snow seem to float on another plane. Tree branches closest to the sun shine like knights in armor from the rime.
Finally, a good facsimile of a winter morning: enough snow to cover the grass, and on the window a tangle of stitches etched in frost.
The return of the cold has saved the last, handkerchief-sized patches of snow. In the east, a silent jet trails the smallest of wakes.