Last night’s snow has left a scant half-inch of fur on all the trees—these naked sleepers. Some of it melts, some evaporates into fog.
Plummer’s Hollow
The sun slowly dims in the whitening sky. Soft taps of a woodpecker. The flashing orange light on the roof of the meter reader’s truck.
A foraging chickadee gives the lilac twigs a thorough grooming. I shut my eyes against the sun and see its white prints all over my retina.
The rain that drummed on the roof all night continues, but no longer turns everything it touches to ice like a cheap King Midas.
Birds forage on the back slope during a break in the rain, the gray juncos among the rocks and the scarlet cardinal in the barberry bush.
Pine siskins in the bend of the road, eating small stones for their gizzards. They rise as one and settle in the crown of a birch.
A faint shimmer of precipitation, and everything encased in a layer of ice as if the world’s been shrink-wrapped for overnight delivery.
A few lost snowflakes floating this way and that. A hunter walks up the road, his safety-orange vest printed with the shapes of leaves.
Warm and overcast. It’s the first day of deer season, and the silence seems charged. The sun appears for three seconds. A blue jay calls.
White ground, white sky, but the roofs are shedding their snow drip by drip. Traffic noise coming from the west—sure sign of rain.
A pileated woodpecker foraging near the ground suddenly flees yelling into the treetops. Several nearby juncos take off too, just in case.
Cold and bright. When I open the door to go in, the wind blows a titmouse in with me. It flies from window to window, clawing at the glass.
The deep quiet only heard on major holidays. With small puffs, snow is beginning to fall off branches, giving the trees a feathered look.
The silence of falling snow. It clings tight to everything, like any newborn. The neighbor’s rooster can’t believe it—he crows and crows.