Freezing fog that lifts after sunrise into a gray woolen sky, leaving frosted branches for the squirrels—gray or red, cautious or pell-mell.
November 20, 2024
We’re in the clouds. They drum on the roofs and echo with bird calls. A dead walnut branch, scaley with lichen, lies in the road like a landed fish.
November 20, 2023
Crystal-clear and very still at dawn. A last meteor disappears into the spreading spill of light on the eastern horizon.
November 20, 2022
As cold as yesterday but with orange-bellied clouds and a wind. A tulip tree seed helicopters into the yard and rises up over the house.
November 20, 2021
A thin wash of cloud at sunrise, and the yard gray with frost. A raven flies low over the hollow giving two-syllable croaks.
November 20, 2020
Cold, but with eddies of warmer air as the sun rises through the trees. It’s clear except for three mare’s tails—remnants of dawn contrails.
November 20, 2019
With birds, a cold and overcast day isn’t gloomy. Their bright chirps and taps. The flashes of white when slate-colored juncos take wing.
November 20, 2018
Colder than yesterday, but also brighter. Just as the sun comes out, a snow flurry blows in, silencing a nearby crow.
November 20, 2017
A skim of snow lingers in the shade. At the woods’ edge, a Carolina wren is holding forth while juncos forage quietly all around him.
November 20, 2016
A whitelash of snow against my cheek. I peer at the asterisks melting into my coat, continuing below my chair as a thin footnote.
November 20, 2015
Branches clack like arrhythmic castanets in the high wind. A few sunlit snowflakes hurtle past, refugees from who knows what distant cloud.
November 20, 2014
Overcast except for a hole where the sun glows like a bleary eye in a socket. A titmouse taps on a windowsill to open a sunflower seed.
November 20, 2013
Clear and cold. As if hounds had learned to play hunting horns, the sound of two Vs of geese going over, one this way and one that.
November 20, 2012
The lace-work of leafless treetops against the clouds. No wonder the dead cherry with its cluster of six limb-stumps reminds me of despair.