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.
Plummer’s Hollow
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.
It’s in the 40s and noisy with the sound of trucks. Each tree stands in a small circle of melted ground like a bear balancing on a unicycle.
A river of fire between the trees where the sun reflects off the snowpack’s white glass. The deep blue sky is marred only by crows.
Sunrise stains the western ridge. A squirrel wanders back and forth on an icy snowbank, stirred, no doubt, by the memory of a buried nut.
43F at sunrise—it feels balmy. The trees rock back and forth under a cloudless sky, touching in ways they rarely do, clattering, groaning.
To the south, the hysterical-sounding whoops of a pileated woodpecker. To the north, the rapid taps of a downy, that tachycardia.