Cold and overcast with a lighter gray patch where the sun might be. The nasal calls of a nuthatch. A distant mob of crows.
Plummer’s Hollow
The sky keeps clouding over and clearing, like a person who can’t make up their mind. High winds roar in the ridgetop trees.
I have to wipe the fog off my chair before I can sit. After a while, it begins to rain. In the dead meadow weeds, a commentary of sparrows.
A huge number of crows hanging out in the treetops at the woods’ edge—not mobbing anything, just being crows, arguing, sharing, kvetching.
A pileated woodpecker trepanning an oak to extract its harmful inhabitants the ants. Distant shots from deer hunters at a similar task.
The sun half-emerges from the clouds, like a chick too weak to break the shell. A small woman walks up the road, led by a large brown dog.
Two crows tail a small hawk on a high-speed chase through the trees, twisting and turning. It loses them and climbs into the clouds.
The birds seem strangely cheerful on this dull, overcast day. A nuthatch even goes up a tree trunk rather than the usual head-first descent.
The freezing rain stops by mid-morning, but the low cloud cover persists. From the valley to the east, the sound of semi-automatic gunfire.
Bright and still. A wren pops out of the cherry snag next the porch. Two chipmunks bound through the dead grass and disappear into the wall.
Windy and cold. The rising sun peeks out from beneath a lid of clouds: in the sudden glow, goldfinches, their squeaky calls.
High winds. The chairs huddle together at the end of the porch. Oak trees rattle; the pines roar. A sparrow flies into the wind, chittering.
A whitelash of snow against my cheek. I peer at the asterisks melting into my coat, continuing below my chair as a thin footnote.
The loud rasp of squirrel teeth trying to gain entry to the chambers of a black walnut. Gibbous moon like an eggshell discarded in the sky.