A stray snowflake wanders down from the pink clouds, itself still white. Doves flock to the birdseed on my mother’s back porch—the silvery whistles of their wings.
Dave Bonta
Overcast and cold. Ten minutes before sunrise, a yellow rent appears in the clouds. In the distance, the neighbor’s chickens start up a racket.
Cold and mostly clear at mid-morning. The small hole down to the stream that flows under my yard is rimmed with hoarfrost, and emits a quiet gurgle.
Bitter cold and still at dawn, as the first silouette of a squirrel emerges from its nest of sticks and leaves high in the limbs of the big tulip and descends the tree, claws ticking against the bark. The clouds redden. A distant rifle booms.
Snow flurries at dawn, the ground more light than dark. A screech owl trills softly up on the ridge as the phone warms my pocket, installing an update.
Rain zebra-striped with snow; the woods more wet than white. A sodden squirrel trots down the road with a black walnut between her teeth.
An hour late for sunrise, I’m consoled by a radiance in the clouds, a sheen on the forest floor, a twittering of goldfinches.
Rainfall stopping by sunrise. An oak leaf comes sailing out of the woods and spirals down onto the porch. Holes in the clouds open and close like blue wounds.
Just as my moonlit shadow slips away into the dawn, the Carolina wrens who roost beside the laundry room door start up, with a brassy TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE and her answering SIIIIIIIIIIIIP!
Light rain at sunrise swept away by a light breeze, the monochrome sky accented by a pair of ravens, and down here a nuthatch going over the rules.
Snowmelt dripping from the eaves. When the sun peeks through the clouds, it becomes a bead curtain. The wren is singing.
Out before dawn with the first snow of the year landing cold kisses on my face. The ground glows pale in the darkness. When I get up to take a walk an hour later, my lap and coat shed their new layer of fur.
A red dawn, a redder sunrise, and a rain shower half an hour after that on the still-novel metal roof. I imagine a steel-pan drummer playing avant-garde calypso.
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.