Sun shining through fog. The garden-wall chipmunk must be in heat: two suitors battle for her attention in what’s left of the snow.
Plummer’s Hollow
The fog is a bad magician. Each time it lifts, it reveals the same trees and snow, the same skinny squirrels, the same two crows jeering.
In the shadows of the treetops, two chipmunks race over and under the three inches of fresh, wet snow. A chickadee sings his spring song.
The sun burns through high clouds. A gleam in the stream from a clump of sedge where spray has made an ice-fingered claw open to the sky.
It’s been raining for 15 hours; the creek roars. The snowy ridges the plow made now resemble the mountains I know, orphaned, deeply eroded.
After a night of rain and unseasonable warmth, the snow cover is threadbare. Moss glows green on the road bank. Waxwings’ silvery whistles.
Ash-gray sky and an inversion layer making it sound as if the highway runs straight through the hollow. Above the din, a titmouse keens.
A soft, cloud-filtered sunlight makes the white hillside glow rather than gleam. The rime-lined creek is still loud from yesterday’s thaw.
Two clouds cross, a high one going north and a low one going south—a sight so odd it feels like an omen, until the song sparrow sings.
An ostinato of dripping on the porch roof. The fog advances, retreats. Somewhere a deer snorts. Drenched squirrels bound over the slush.
Two degrees above freezing and I feel over-dressed. Icicles drop from the eaves. A Carolina wren sings his “tea kettle” song in a minor key.
Steady, fine snow—the kind that means business. A rabbit dashes across the springhouse yard and disappears into the crown of a fallen tree.
Mesmerized by the snow, after a while I forget that that steady twittering isn’t the sound the flakes make as they fall. It’s just juncos.
Steady sleet. A squirrel bores into the frozen earth to retrieve a black walnut, then schleps the battered, lumpy thing into the treetops.