Creak and rattle from the woods. A distant gunshot. Overhead, the shapely cumulus could almost be a summer sky, if it didn’t move so fast.
December 5, 2010
That first snow still cloaks the frozen earth. When the wind dies, I can hear the 75 finches at my parents’ birdfeeder, a twittering bedlam.
December 4, 2010
Snowflakes sail past like far-flung voyagers. On the otherwise lifeless tansy stalks, a green sprig harbors a single, yolk-colored bloom.
December 3, 2010
Tuesday’s rain still roars in the creek and gurgles under the yard. The moss garden has turned mountainous from an orogeny of ice.
December 2, 2010
A blaze-orange hunting coat floats through the snowy woods, out-of-place as a sign in the desert: burning bush, billboard, neon whorehouse.
December 1, 2010
Just as I take my seat the sleet starts. Pellets the size of fish eyes lodge in the folds of my coat. The brown ground turns a glassy white.
November 30, 2010
A cold, wet morning that must test the hunters’ mettle. Over the rain, the rattle of the window-tapping cardinal clashing with her nemesis.
November 29, 2010
Blue overhead, and the frost so heavy, it looks like a light snow. From the barnyard, the voices of hunters returning with their first kill.
November 28, 2010
I arrive on the porch at the same time as the sun: the first blazing quills top the ridge and a sneeze begins to prickle behind my nose.
November 27, 2010
A scurf of snow in the north corner of the porch, and more flakes in the wind. A chickadee puffs out its feathers, fat as a baseball.
November 26, 2010
Windy, with mottled gray and white clouds and a muddy yellow smudge for the sun, as in a fingerpainting. A siskin’s sharp-edged note.
November 25, 2010
Steady rain, and the temperature just two degrees above freezing. In the herb bed, the pale blue wheel of a blossom on the invasive myrtle.
November 24, 2010
The sun peeks through windows of deep blue. I watch a crow flying silently from tree to tree as another crow follows, pecking and jeering.
November 23, 2010
An inversion layer at daybreak: the high whine of tires on asphalt rings in my ear. The sky grows dark again, but it’s only a mizzle.