A squirrel’s scolding echoes off the hillside, with the same, semi-automatic and hysterical qualities of any rant against the powerful.
Plummer’s Hollow
In the wake of a slow-moving cloud, sunlight spreads through the woods trunk by trunk, branch by branch like a contagion none can escape.
Just one degree above freezing, but most of last night’s wet snow has fallen from the trees, rococo filigree replaced by stark modernism.
One squirrel leads another through the woods, pausing repeatedly to let it catch up. Only when a third joins in does it turn into a chase.
This isn’t silence but a steady roar, ridgetop wind drowning out everything except for the wren, who translates that agitation into his own.
A cloud has settled in and delegated to the trees its responsibility to rain. Some restless animal gnaws on a beam under the house.
The sun shines through thin clouds; tree shadows on the snow are light gray rather than blue. A red-bellied woodpecker trills over and over.
Wind and a little new snow have softened the landscape’s hardest edges. The birches squeak like beginning fiddlers trying to get in tune.
Chickadees scold something hidden in the treetops. I can’t stop looking at a dried bromegrass leaf—its ornate curlicues against the snow.
Snowflakes swirl clockwise around the yard. A red-tailed hawk flies over, flapping hard, pale feathers almost invisible in the falling snow.
With less water, the stream is louder than it was yesterday. Three-inch cataracts splash into teacup-sized plunge pools.
The sun rises above a mass of cloud looming like the lost, real mountain for which this is a foothill. A wren pops out from under the porch.
A squirrel leaps through the snow-laden lilac up by the other house, chasing the juncos. Their high, tinny alarm-calls sound like laughter.
Cold and bleak. The clouds part above the ridge: a circle of blue bisected by a wide, shining contrail, the jet roaring just out of sight.