Clear and bracing, like a shot of vodka. The thirteen cattail heads beside the springhouse sway gently in the dawn light.
Plummer’s Hollow
Heavy frost, and the bare dirt in the garden has crystallized into icy turrets. Motes of snow float past, backlit by the sun. Robin song.
A thin powder glazes all the logs and fallen limbs—white ships on a brown sea. The high-pitched whistles of waxwings passing overhead.
Cold and dawn-dark at 8:30. The ridge disappears into cloud, allowing me to imagine real mountains—a fastness far from anything but rain.
A turkey gobbles up in the corner of the field, and five seconds later, a turkey vulture soars into view. The sky is an implacable white.
Cold, gray and rainy. I’m wearing my spring coat, but it could be November, except for the pussy willow catkins—those glimmering furs.
Cold and quiet. Two phoebes are refurbishing the nest under the springhouse eaves, going to the stream and returning with beaks full of mud.
Colder this morning, and no sign of the phoebes that came back yesterday. A robin sings and falls silent. The sun comes out, goes in.
Cloudy and warm. A robin sings in the yard, garrulous as an unmarried uncle. Red-bellied woodpeckers leapfrog each other on a tree trunk.
Mid-morning, and the dial thermometer’s big red arrow creeps toward 50. A small sun and bare trees bend in the distance of its convex glass.
Overcast and damp. In the garden, the new leaves of lamb’s-ears look fresher than they did last fall, delicately furred, alive, alert.
Sun glimmers through thin clouds, the ground is hazy with frost, and me trying to blink the sleep from my eyes. A nuthatch’s anxious call.
Scattered snowflakes wander back and forth like lost souls. I watch one explode against a branch of the dead cherry. The croak of a raven.
On the flattened grass where snow has sat for months, the gray disk of an old hornet nest. The feral cat presses her belly fur to the earth.