Cold and overcast, but with a broad palette of grays. Two geese go over, one silent, the other bugling non-stop. I resist the urge to check the news.
Plummer’s Hollow
A gray sunrise, signalled only by the yelling of crows. After yesterday’s warmth, the ground is more brown than white. The wind picks up, clattering through the treetops.
A fresh half-inch of snow, and the ground’s as white as the sky again. From over the ridge, the roar of a Monday morning. A blue jay jeers.
Cold and very quiet, with a blue sky slowly fading to white. A vulture drifts past the sun without flapping a wing.
Temperature falling as the sun rises. The sound of wind from far off. A small scarlet oak that kept some of its leaves shivers a little.
Fog thickens as the rain eases off. The sodden snowpack shrinks, fitting the ground more closely, clinging to each mound and divot.
Mostly clear and mostly quiet. A squirrel summits a 20-foot-tall stump and looks all about. The three small clouds turn red.
Wind and thaw. Fat clouds sail over with bright orange prows and dark bellies. A dead leaf makes circles in the corner of the porch.
In the half-dark of dawn, the white noise of wind is made literal by flocks of snowflakes swirling this way and that. Rabbit tracks go under the house and do not reemerge.
Clear at daybreak with an inversion layer: tires on rumble strips interrupting the chatter of finches. The sun prickly as a porcupine among the trees.
A sunrise in layers of orange and gray makes the absence of color below in the snow seem absolutely surreal. Three crows fly over the house. The furnace rumbles awake.
Sunrise reddens a third of the sky. The male cardinal, clearly in his glory, holds forth.
Snow at sunrise: widely-spaced flakes falling from a half-clear sky for more than half an hour. After a while, I feel as if I’m witnessing some sort of procession, slow and silent.
Out before dawn. The roofline’s lone icicle glitters in the light of a moon grown thin and sharp. Out of the corner of my eye, a slight movement in the shadows that might or might not be a weasel.