A dusting of snow that will be gone by the afternoon, under a sky hoarding its white. A downy woodpecker’s machine-gun burst of taps.
January 17,
Every morning should start this way, with enough snow fallen in the night to erase yesterday’s tracks: the proverbial clean slate. The sound of my neighbor’s plow scraping down to the ice.
Five degrees and breezy. The creek still gurgles, low and slow, with Venus through the trees flickering like a candle in the wind.
Cold rain. The last scrap of December’s snow in the yard has shrunk to the size of a handkerchief. A back-and-forth between a titmouse and a chickadee.
The tail-end of a storm that brought snow, sleet, freezing rain, and snow again. The trees look like they’ve been dipped in confectioner’s sugar.
Seven cardinals—three pairs and a lone male—take turns drinking from the stream, then perch in the lilac’s bare branches, four feet apart.
Clear and cold. As the sun climbs higher, the blue deepens. Yesterday’s thin snow clings to the porch floorboards when I try to sweep.
Gloomy, but the birds seem excited, perhaps sensing an approaching storm. A titmouse fleeing a fight lands on a maple limb red with fungus.
Mid-morning and the trees are starting to shed their latest coat of snow. A pileated woodpecker, too, comes loose, and flaps off cackling.
Fog heightens the intrigue of January’s gray-squirrel soap opera: the slow-motion chases, the tree-top fights, the ruses to elude stalkers.
A cold, gray morning. Up in the woods, a chickadee’s two-note song prompts a cardinal to join in. The sun’s hiding place begins to glow.
The sun fades from blaze to smolder to smear. I notice a bent-down cherry limb that looks like a dancer—something I won’t be able to un-see.
A line of tracks from under the porch to the creek and back look like the prints a very small man walking on his hands would make: raccoon.
Cold rain drips in the pre-dawn darkness. The wail of a locomotive sounds frighteningly close and full of an obscure, mechanical longing.