A ray of sun strikes the lilac, setting its yellow buds aglow. The sound of water gurgling under my yard. The back-and-forth of nuthatches.
Plummer’s Hollow
A dark morning; the ridges disappear into fog. A Carolina wren’s call is barely audible over the rain’s deafening hush.
Another gray day. The only snow left is what the plow mounded up, the earliest dating back to before Christmas: literal snows of yesteryear.
Under low, heavy clouds, the air is still. I listen for the patter of raindrops but all I hear is a nuthatch, some crows, a raven’s croak.
Can daylight be saved? An hour late, I watch the sun assemble itself among the ridgetop trees one blazing shard at a time—a kind of kintsugi.
The temperature’s back below freezing—the price we pay for such an achingly blue sky. Up by the garage, a field sparrow’s accelerating chant.
Snow is gone from the north side of the springhouse roof; the stream has a whole new range of notes. Up by the barn, a phoebe is calling.
On the northwest-facing hillside, the snow has shrunk to patches overnight. A robin sings here and there as if testing the acoustics.
Sun in the tops of the pines. The sine curve of a pileated woodpecker’s flight path over the house. Her mad cackle after she lands.
Almost warm, and the sky almost clear. Two chipmunks sit two feet apart on top of the wall, staring off in different directions.
Cardinal song from the woods’ edge, but where’s the cardinal? Leaving the porch, I spot him—in a yard tree. I’d been listening to the echo.
Clear and cold. The scattered, jubilant cries of six swans—too few to form a chevron—passing high overhead, bellies pink with sunrise.
Fourth-quarter moon just above the trees. The dawn chorus begins with a mourning dove. Then Carolina wren, crows, a red-winged blackbird.
Sunny but cold. The woods-edge chipmunk scuttles back and forth. Tips of dead grasses hanging into the stream have new feet of ice.