A squirrel bounds over the snow with a newly disinterred walnut in its teeth. Behind it in the yard, a neat hole ringed with pieces of husk.
Plummer’s Hollow
The sound of Monday carries on the wind over the ridge. Here, patches of blue, none of them yet coinciding with the sun. A raven croaks.
A cacophony of crows, doves, cardinal, titmouse, nuthatch, woodpecker, squirrel, locomotive, all amid the silent carpet-bombing of the snow.
The high winds have stopped, but who knows how much snow has fallen? An apple core tossed into the yard for the deer disappears with a thud.
The snow-plastered chairs are huddled at the end of the porch like sheep, and the end-table has lost its top. I pull two hoods over my hat.
A large red blot has blossomed on the garden’s snow. I find tufts of silky brown fur and three drops of blood in a line toward the woods.
A morning for woodpeckers: I hear the trilling of a red-bellied, the cackling of a pileated, and a downy’s steady trepanning of a maple.
Thick fog prolongs the early-morning light for hours. The cardinal sings spring while a screech owl quavers over the luminous snow.
That metronome-like sound—could it possibly be a chipmunk? I cup hands to my ears: no, it’s just slow meltwater. But the clock is ticking.
The nasal call of a jay became the soundtrack of happiness one sun-drenched afternoon of my childhood. The place is gone now—a subdivision.
Fresh excavations in the yard—a puzzle. Have the deer developed a taste for myrtle, the green of its leathery leaves under all that snow?
Late morning, and the gray gives way to deepest blue. Treetops clack like rib-bone castanets, gleaming in the sun.
The dog statue in the yard is still buried except for its vigilant tail. On either side, the excavations of deer.
I strain to hear the waking birds, but sound is out of the west: cars, trucks, winter tires—the fossil-fueled Fat Tuesday that never ends.