Three days past the last rain, the creek sings in a lower key, like a boy turning into a man. Free of silt, it’s learning how to be blue.
Plummer’s Hollow
Clear, cold and windy. A turkey vulture slides sideways above the trees, rocking on its rigid wings like a catamaran crossing a rough sea.
Backlit by the sun, the weathered mountain laurel bushes turn to green fire under the trees, with pale shadows that must be patches of snow.
After all-night rain, snow cover persists in the woods, but it must be thin. The trees loom and fade as the fog shifts. The stream roars.
Three stalks of garlic in the yard have kept their heads throughout this long winter, seasoning the snows. The distant fluting of geese.
Gray sky. A gray breast feather floats down and lands on the snow. Ten minutes later, a sharp-shinned hawk appears in the big maple.
A thumping in the crawlspace under the house and muddy footprints in the snow: the resident woodchuck is in heat. Rain drums on the roof.
Winter on this side, winter on the other side, and in between the road’s dead grass and gravel. One crow cries, high and shrill.
Backlit by the sun, a hoarfrosted forest with ice still glittering underneath. I gape and run for my camera, a tourist on my own porch.
Six inches of fresh powder. A pair of squirrels wrestle in it, then go up the big maple, couple on the trunk, and retreat to separate limbs.
A fresh cement of wintry mix traversed by chipmunks, tails italic with urgency. Ice-coated branches rock in the wind—a cellophane sound.
A wind in the night swept the broom off the porch; I find it in the garden. A thin milk of clouds. The sun’s whiskers slowly disappear.
Just audible over the wind: a junco’s chitter. Leaves lift off from the newly melted forest floor and join a harried flock of snowflakes.
I hear voices: snowmelt whispering, murmuring, sighing, gurgling a hundred ways at once. Up in the newly bare field, a turkey gobbles.