Cold but clear. Two crows are arguing: the one caws, the other makes that strange scraping rattle, like a sound effect from a horror film.
Plummer’s Hollow
Thick fog blanks everything but the noise from the highway—this could be New Jersey. Rain beads on the branches of the ornamental cherry.
The snow is gone (again) and the first phoebe circles the barn and shed, expressing his satisfaction with the location, location, location.
Rain overnight has reduced our Good Friday snow to a lacy patchwork in the woods, so much cleaner and paler than the old snows of winter.
Clear and cold. A song sparrow sings half again faster than usual—”Hip hip hurrah boys, spring is here!”—as if he really means it this time.
At dawn, I watch the moonlight fading into the snow like the light going out of the eyes of a dying creature. The gurgle of the stream.
Easter Sunday dawns clear and cold. The yard is stippled with fresh tracks. Quiet except for a mourning dove and a red-bellied woodpecker.
Five inches of fresh snow, the kind that clings to every twig. I catch a movement up in the woods: a deer raises its tail to take a shit.
The wind has smashed my chair, so I carry my coffee up behind the barn to watch the woodcock circling in the dawn sky. A satellite flares.
Windy and cold. The last three dots of snow visible from the porch have disappeared in the night. Overhead, a small window opens onto blue.
Hours of hard rain have brought out the green in tree trunks and branches, in laurel leaves, in moss. Even the fog has a slight green cast.
One degree above freezing, and something part-way between rain and snow is coming down, already half-melted, making an audible shush.
First crystal-clear morning in weeks. I sit watching the sunlight move through the trees and a distant jet trailed by nothing but its roar.
Yellow sun in an overcast sky: how is this possible? It lasts for a couple minutes before fading into a bright smudge in a net of branches.