Cold not as deep as predicted due to a lid of cloud, which eases open in the east—just enough for the sun to flood the western ridge with light. The warble of a house finch.
Bright and bitter cold, with a wind obsessively rearranging the snow. A ragged oak leaf comes tumbling out of the woods and skitters up the road, following a stripe of sunlight.
A heavy, gray sky that from time to time emits a shimmer of fine precipitation. Woodpeckers’ rhythms turn irregular as they move from their drumming trees to their dining trees. A bit of highway noise for the first time in a week.
Cold and still. When my furnace rumbles to a stop, the only sound is a distant titmouse. A sneeze gathers in my sinuses: my explosive homage to the rising sun.
Cold and still as the last few yellow-bellied clouds sail off. A fast raven chase goes over, trailing metallic shrieks. The sun clears the ridge and all the trees don their blue shadows.
A slow snowfall that never quite quits as I sit enjoying the balmy temperature—just seven degrees below freezing!—and the continuing, slow-motion courtship of the squirrels.
Three or four slow-moving squirrels crowd onto the big tulip tree. But there’s a loner 50 feet away, diving repeatedly into the snow as if unable to locate a buried nut. After a while, he retreats into the canopy to eat black birch seeds.
Cold and mostly gray. A gray squirrel at the end of the porch tries and fails to muster the courage to walk past me, approaching, retreating, studying me like the weather.
Wind hissing in the pines. A titmouse’s monotonous call. The distant tone cluster of a train horn. A white-breasted nuthatch pipes up.
Quiet except for the wingbeats of a raven. When the icy breeze dies, my breath begins to freeze to my glasses. Sun-sparkles in the snow fall victim to a bank of clouds.
The deep cold continues, with a fresh dusting of snow on the porch and high, thin clouds that sap the sun of its blaze. A bitter wind slips in under my coat.
Sunrise sky like an illuminated manuscript: that blue, that gold leaf. The red squirrel pokes its head out of its hole in the black locust behind the spinghouse to give everything a resounding scold.
In deep cold and silence, entranced by sun-sparkle and the slow shadow-play of trees in the yard, I nearly turn into the Simpsons meme, Old Man Yells at Clouds.
While my neighbor takes a tractor to what Winter Storm Fern left behind, some of the more desultory snowflakes floating down now are close to half an inch across—testament to how long they’ve spent in the clouds, growing arms that look like nothing so much as fronds of fern.