Wind and thaw. Fat clouds sail over with bright orange prows and dark bellies. A dead leaf makes circles in the corner of the porch.
Dave Bonta
In the half-dark of dawn, the white noise of wind is made literal by flocks of snowflakes swirling this way and that. Rabbit tracks go under the house and do not reemerge.
Clear at daybreak with an inversion layer: tires on rumble strips interrupting the chatter of finches. The sun prickly as a porcupine among the trees.
A sunrise in layers of orange and gray makes the absence of color below in the snow seem absolutely surreal. Three crows fly over the house. The furnace rumbles awake.
Sunrise reddens a third of the sky. The male cardinal, clearly in his glory, holds forth.
Snow at sunrise: widely-spaced flakes falling from a half-clear sky for more than half an hour. After a while, I feel as if I’m witnessing some sort of procession, slow and silent.
Out before dawn. The roofline’s lone icicle glitters in the light of a moon grown thin and sharp. Out of the corner of my eye, a slight movement in the shadows that might or might not be a weasel.
Two below zero, and at least two gray squirrels are in heat now. I watch a suitor bound over the snow and into the trees, leaping from the twiggy end of one limb to another, finding a way.
Zero at dawn, and very quiet. Finally a nuthatch pipes up, followed by a junco. From inside the tall locust tree behind the springhouse, the muffled scolding of red squirrels.
A half moon all alone in thin clouds like a lost knife. The plank wall of the house behind me pops from the cold.
Snow starts in the gray dawn of a quiet Sunday, small flakes falling thickly, turning the road white again. Distant sirens. A squirrel crouches on a limb with its tail over its head.
Overcast with a slightly less gray patch in the east. The smoke from my chimney sinks to the ground and drifts off through the trees: some weather’s on the way.
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.
Overcast, cold and still. A pair of amorous squirrels climb slowly up and down the trees at the woods’ edge. I take it on faith that the sun has risen.