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.
A wedge of yellow light in the clouds for half an hour past sunrise. I’m learning to spot when a squirrel is about to dig up a nut: it stares off into space in one last effort to convince any watcher that it’s doing something entirely different.
An hour past sunrise, the clouds are darker closer to the horizon. Three crows are having an argument in the treetops that ends with one of them angrily leaving the premises. The hiss of wind.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Gloomy and cold. A mourning dove stays frozen on its branch at the woods’ edge half an hour after the Cooper’s hawk’s failed sortie at the feeders.
A fresh inch and a half of dry snow, and the bitter wind that bore it now ushering a flotilla of orange clouds across a sky of startling blue. From my mother’s house, the murmur of voices on the radio like a distant surf, accompanied not by the cries of gulls but the chatter of house finches.
A screech owl’s shivery call. It’s too dark at first to see the shimmer of snow in the air, but as sunrise approaches one can begin to distinguish white streaks, like a head of hair just beginning to go gray.
I have to sweep three inches of snow off the porch before I can sit down, and when I do, flakes of great size land on my lap—little throwing stars a quarter-inch across. When the wind drops, I can hear the Carolina wren.