White sun in a white sky. Off in the woods, the tattered white flag of a shadbush in bloom.
The sun is at half-power, shining through cirrus clouds, the still-bare branches of oaks and black birches, and the trill of a goldfinch, which shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
Clear and still with frost in the yard and the gibbous moon caught in the treetops like a deflated balloon. A brown creeper sprials up a walnut tree. The sun comes up.
A cold wind rummaging through the forest, mixing up the sounds of crows and trains and sirens. The sun appears for a second or two at a time.
Two towhees tweet as I drink my tea. Finally they meet at the woods’ edge, tails flared, and one flees. Blue holes appear in the clouds.
Against the gray sky, one small dash of yellow at the woods’ edge: a male goldfinch. Nearby, the slow chant of a blue-headed vireo.
It’s still cool and overcast, but the daffodils have straightened up and bright spots are appearing in the clouds. A hen turkey walks past, head down, selecting small stones for her gizzard.
Cold and heavily overcast. A gray squirrel emerges from the woods like a ghost, seeming to float over the rain-darkened leaf duff, fur the color of the sky.
It may be cold, damp, and cloudy, but budburst has come to the old lilac, once again stippled in bright green despite having to re-leaf after last summer’s drought.
Sunrise somewhere between showers, cold and sodden, the sky flat-white like the eye of a dead fish. No flies for the flycatchers, no sun for the wren.
Below freezing still, and the sky more clear than not. Up on the ridge, a hermit thrush is singing: faint chimes, as if some gate to paradise had a doorbell.
A patchwork sky at sunrise with a bitter wind. The daffodils’ cups are all overturned. A few lost snowflakes straggle past.
Cold rain with an occasional rattle of ice pellets. The creek has risen from a gurgle to a gush. The cardinal sings from deep within the juniper.
Damp gloom suffused with white-throated sparrow song, high and thin and tremulous, amid bright splashes of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush.