Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Cold and heavily overcast, with an inversion layer bringing the sounds of tires singing on the interstate, white-throated sparrows awakening in the meadow, and the clink of tin cans against birdfeeders from up at the other house, my mother clearing her throat.
The sun clears the ridgetop and a bank of clouds by 8:30. The female Carolina wren trills, but there’s no sign of the male, who was missing last night from his usual roost above the laundry-room door. A half moon hangs overhead, pale as a slice of apple.
A bitter cold wind at dawn. A raven croaking as high as a crow flies over, setting off a chickadee. Then nothing again but the sound of wind.
Waiting for a weather system that stays west of the Allegheny Front, I give up on the chance of snow, go in just as the sun burns through the clouds—a smear of blaze.
Overcast and still. A squirrel running across the road drops the frozen walnut in her teeth, and it rolls along by itself for a few feet. Up on the ridge, a tree pops from the cold.
Well below freezing at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker drums as if it were already courtship season. Two squirrels briefly touch noses, then back away and resume solitary foraging.
The sky and ground nearly rhyme in their oppressive whiteness. A red squirrel sounds as if he’s having a psychotic break, trying to defend a hollow black locust no doubt stuffed with acorns and walnuts.
An hour past sunrise, there’s a growing radiance as blue sky spreads in the west. Even after all these years of wildlife-watching, I can’t stop marvelling at the acrobatics and shenanigans of gray squirrels.
The clouds begin to thin by mid-morning, lightening the gloom. The hollow hulk of a dead maple next to the road emits nuthatch calls.
Light snow falling at sunrise—enough to obscure the identity of a line of tracks emerging from under the house. In the patch of dead bracken, one frond sways gently on its stalk.
White ground and a white sky, with only the trees to keep them apart. The squirrels are still avoiding the snowy sides of limbs, except when they need a spot to sit and work on a nut.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Heavily overcast, with a brief insinuation of pink at two minutes till sunrise. The fluting of tundra swans draws my eye to a high, ragged convoy just disappearing over the ridge.
Gloomy and still. The faint rattle of something like rain, that soon turns into something like snow and peters out. A distant honking of geese.