Rain seasoned with sleet. The trapped balloons hang limply from their dead tree, wrinkled like over-ripe fruit.
Squirrels sound the predator alarm, and a song sparrow in the lilac stays motionless for minutes, until I’m half-convinced it’s just a burl.
The dead are restless, through no fault of their own: last year’s leaves shuffled about by the wind. But the sun is strong. A phoebe calls.
Neither hot nor cold, and the sun’s neither out nor in. The daffodil spears look just a little taller, and the moss maybe a bit more bright.
Wind turns the pages of my notebook. The sun is bright, and I’m feeling happy for the small woodpecker who’s found a very loud branch.
Snow mixed with sleet. The feral balloons have wrapped themselves more tightly around their tree—a classic trade of freedom for security.
Distant gunshots from the shooting range in the valley. The impression of rising excitement in a field sparrow’s song.
Warmish and rainy. From the valley to the east: a great blue heron with its sword-blade wings, its spring-loaded neck. A killdeer’s call.
Gnats are flying, and I think about the first insects, 340 million years before flowers—an alien earth preserved in these very hills.
The snowbank has shrunk to the size of a dog curled up on the dead grass. A tom turkey lets loose with his lust-gargle, his aggressive ache.
After a cold night, the gift of clarity: a mote of drifting cattail down visible at 100 yards. A raven croaking on high is echoed by a crow.
Trapped in a tree, two balloons bearing a picture of a basketball and the name of a school west of Pittsburgh rub their Mylar skins together.
Sun through thin clouds—dim as a lizard’s third eye. A red-tailed hawk drifts past without flapping.
Deep blue sky. The distant rumble of a freight train heading west. The one remaining snowbank in the yard looks permanent as marble.