Clear at daybreak with an inversion layer: tires on rumble strips interrupting the chatter of finches. The sun prickly as a porcupine among the trees.
A sunrise in layers of orange and gray makes the absence of color below in the snow seem absolutely surreal. Three crows fly over the house. The furnace rumbles awake.
Sunrise reddens a third of the sky. The male cardinal, clearly in his glory, holds forth.
Snow at sunrise: widely-spaced flakes falling from a half-clear sky for more than half an hour. After a while, I feel as if I’m witnessing some sort of procession, slow and silent.
Out before dawn. The roofline’s lone icicle glitters in the light of a moon grown thin and sharp. Out of the corner of my eye, a slight movement in the shadows that might or might not be a weasel.
Two below zero, and at least two gray squirrels are in heat now. I watch a suitor bound over the snow and into the trees, leaping from the twiggy end of one limb to another, finding a way.
Zero at dawn, and very quiet. Finally a nuthatch pipes up, followed by a junco. From inside the tall locust tree behind the springhouse, the muffled scolding of red squirrels.
A half moon all alone in thin clouds like a lost knife. The plank wall of the house behind me pops from the cold.
Snow starts in the gray dawn of a quiet Sunday, small flakes falling thickly, turning the road white again. Distant sirens. A squirrel crouches on a limb with its tail over its head.
Overcast with a slightly less gray patch in the east. The smoke from my chimney sinks to the ground and drifts off through the trees: some weather’s on the way.
Every morning should start this way, with enough snow fallen in the night to erase yesterday’s tracks: the proverbial clean slate. The sound of my neighbor’s plow scraping down to the ice.
Overcast, cold and still. A pair of amorous squirrels climb slowly up and down the trees at the woods’ edge. I take it on faith that the sun has risen.
A fresh scurf of snow on the porch. The trees with their moon-shadows stretching east like dark carpets rolled out for the rumored sun. All the old aches in my body. It’s cold.
The deep cold has returned, bringing silence and a bitter wind. The just-past-full moon slips behind a cloud in the west and never returns. From under the house, the sound of gnawing.