Cold and still at dawn, with widely spaced snowflakes that continue slowly falling for hours as the shapes of things emerge from the darkness, the valley traffic and the birds start up, and the sky lightens to a sullen gray.
Plummer’s Hollow
Another dusting of snow. An hour past sunrise, the clouds above the ridge ease open just enough for the sun to glower through for two minutes.
A dusting of snow that will be gone by the afternoon, under a sky hoarding its white. A downy woodpecker’s machine-gun burst of taps.
A wedge of blue sky opens at sunrise. Four pileated woodpeckers in the hollow take turns drumming, two low, two high. Half an hour later, it’s gray and quiet.
Unable to read due to flying snow, I start a collection of asterisks in my lap. When the wind dies, I can hear my mother yelling at the squirrels.
Heavily overcast and loud with train and traffic noise. Two geese fly over the house without making a sound.
An hour past sunrise, the sun finally hits my porch. A gray squirrel is hectoring all and sundry about some long-gone hawk. The cardinal sings.
Sunrise. A spirited argument breaks out between a raven and some crows as the sky’s ephemeral pagentry fades to gray.
Crescent moon high in the east at dawn. Great-horned owls duet in the distance. A long freight train wraps the mountain in its rumble.
A flat-white sky crossed by the occasional crow. From the other house, finch chatter at the feeder erupts and subsides every few minutes.
The half-moon at dawn wears the sparest of halos, glowing like an ear into which someone has just whispered something scandalous.
A clear morning at last, the hollow echoing with woodpecker drums. The last few patches of ice are as dull as the eyes of a corpse.
The thaw has come, and the ground is mostly earth-colored again. A breeze springs up, spotting my glasses with rain. The sound of traffic.
The warmest morning in weeks. Under a gray-wool sky, two gray squirrels climb slowly together up one of the tallest woods-edge trees—in the mood, it seems, for love.