Cold and overcast. Snowflakes almost too light to fall wander like miniature spacecraft reconnoitering in advance of a full-scale invasion.
Plummer’s Hollow
The rooster’s call is still all wrong—despairing rather than jubilant. An airplane engine drops in pitch as it fades into the distance.
The slow, silent drift of a contrail. Juncos silhouetted by the sun have silver linings, a fact of which they must surely be oblivious.
A persistent knocking from inside the tall cherry stump. I walk around it: a downy woodpecker’s wingtip protrudes from a roosting hole.
In the weak sun, a violent sneeze possesses me. It echoes off the hillside, sets a squirrel to scolding. A pileated woodpecker drums.
The sky is clearing, the low-angled, mid-morning sun illuminating the woods for minutes at a time. Finches in the birches. A distant raven.
The hillside crowd of trees swaying and churning. In the gray sky, blue wounds open. I can hear my mother shouting a greeting to the sun.
Fog. In the absence of the usual noise from quarry and factories, I can hear every grunt and groan of the trucks jake-braking on I-99.
A steady shimmer of rain. Wet tree trunks glow gray-green with lichen, and the lilac looks festive with its orange strings of dead bindweed.
Frost on the grass like mildew. An echoey rasping sound that can only be a squirrel chiseling at a black walnut shell inside a hollow tree.
Jays, crows, and a raven: the solstice soundtrack. When I open my laptop, a red bead of a ladybug is huddled among the black keys.
Christmas Bird Count! Crow, junco, white-throated sparrow. Three chickadees, two nuthatches and a cardinal. Nothing in the damn pear tree.
Overcast and dreary. The neighbor’s rooster is drowned out by a train, its air horn blowing an almost perfect minor chord.
Colder, with a flat white sky and the ground lightly seasoned with snow. A lone nuthatch zigzags and spirals up the trunk of a tall locust.