Just below freezing; the snow lays here and melts there. A flock of finches in the treetops—punctuation marks in search of a sentence.
Plummer’s Hollow
Scattered chickadee calls coalesce into a heated argument. The sun emerges for half a minute through a vulva-shaped opening in the clouds.
Snowflakes land on the dog’s thick brown fur and take a long time to melt. I begin to look differently at the brown, snow-dusted hillside.
A great silence punctuated only by an occasional gun shot. A squirrel digs up a black walnut from beside the porch and bounds off with it.
Cold and still under a flat white sky. Then calls of chickadees, excited about the least thing. A Carolina wren pops up to scold the dog.
Cold and overcast. The wind eddies around the house, bringing first a few snowflakes, then the distant mechanical gargle of an engine brake.
After last night’s wind, the trees are finally almost bare. I close my eyes against the sun and a lurid sky with dark lacework rises up.
In the steady rain, a gray squirrel is climbing all over the big tulip tree, as if searching for something. A raven goes croaking overhead.
Late morning: the sun finally comes out. The cedar tree beside the house chirps and shakes with juncos, which soon spill out into the weeds.
The forest is still a-flicker with falling leaves—astonishing this late in the year. Distant church bells. A chipmunk’s agitated ticking.
Heavy frost. When the sun strikes it, a faint mist rises from the yard. My father stops the car in the road to say he’s just seen a mink.
The hillside glistens with last night’s rain, fallen leaves cupping thousands of thumbnail-sized puddles too cold for slugs.
Frost on the bent-down blades of cattails. Two single-prop planes from different directions—their drones blending then separating again.
The hiss of the wind. Oak leaves scud above the treetops in one direction while juncos and sparrows move through the weeds in the other.