Three or four slow-moving squirrels crowd onto the big tulip tree. But there’s a loner 50 feet away, diving repeatedly into the snow as if unable to locate a buried nut. After a while, he retreats into the canopy to eat black birch seeds.
Dave Bonta
Cold and mostly gray. A gray squirrel at the end of the porch tries and fails to muster the courage to walk past me, approaching, retreating, studying me like the weather.
Wind hissing in the pines. A titmouse’s monotonous call. The distant tone cluster of a train horn. A white-breasted nuthatch pipes up.
Quiet except for the wingbeats of a raven. When the icy breeze dies, my breath begins to freeze to my glasses. Sun-sparkles in the snow fall victim to a bank of clouds.
The deep cold continues, with a fresh dusting of snow on the porch and high, thin clouds that sap the sun of its blaze. A bitter wind slips in under my coat.
Sunrise sky like an illuminated manuscript: that blue, that gold leaf. The red squirrel pokes its head out of its hole in the black locust behind the spinghouse to give everything a resounding scold.
In deep cold and silence, entranced by sun-sparkle and the slow shadow-play of trees in the yard, I nearly turn into the Simpsons meme, Old Man Yells at Clouds.
While my neighbor takes a tractor to what Winter Storm Fern left behind, some of the more desultory snowflakes floating down now are close to half an inch across—testament to how long they’ve spent in the clouds, growing arms that look like nothing so much as fronds of fern.
Curtains of snow are falling and falling without a sound, except for the occasional outbreak of squabbling among the clearly delighted snow birds. The growing collection of snowflakes in my lap seems to include far more needles than stars.
Deep cold. Somewhere up on the ridge, an oak’s icy heartwood goes off like a gun. Ten minutes before sunrise, the eastern sky turns blood-red. A Carolina wren offers the briefest of commentaries.
Cold, windy, and mostly clear for the hour between sunrise and the actual appearance of the sun. Wriggling my fingers for warmth, I watch a small cloud acquiring a glow as it sails off east.
Last night’s snow is still falling as wind sweeps through the forest, shaking the trees down. Meltwater drips from the porch roof. Rhododendron leaves, no longer tightly curled against the cold, shimmer in the sun.
A cold, white expanse of sky with one small blaze off through the trees. It’s quiet. A squirrel chiseling a walnut shell is the loudest thing.
Blue sky, orange clouds, and the temperature so far below freezing, the slightest breeze turns my cheeks numb. After a while I notice the complete absence of squirrels.