A wool-gray sky. This is not the blue morning we were promised! But tell it to the bluebirds warbling above the garage.
Is it overcast or sunny, warm or cold? I don’t even notice. The line crew is back, and they’ve chainsawed the top off a dwarf pear tree.
Loggers clearing trees along the powerline: chainsaws scream, then drop to a low growl. The soft thump of a tree hitting the ground.
Dark clouds part in the west, flooding the yard at sunrise with sunset light. A log furred with white fungi glows in the snow-free woods.
Walnut tree branches behind the house rock by turns, as if from the passage of some large animal, but it’s only this warm-blooded wind.
Where the fresh snow has just melted on the concrete walkway, a bright green blush of lichen. The nuthatch’s three nasal notes.
This could be March, were it not for the late, slow-rising sun. The powerline right-of-way is a band of yellow light through the dark woods.
The snow is reduced to patches now, and the stream runs loud. The book I’m reading says there’s no such thing as a pure white horse.
The white flame of a deer’s tail bobs among the laurel. Another doe shakes her head, flinging rain water in all directions.
Fog at daybreak, and a thin coat of sleet like coarse sand. From up in the woods, the sudden squealing of a squirrel fighting off a suitor.
I think it’s partly because the hillside is covered with evergreen laurel that this phenomenon of a white ground still seems so surreal.
Five degrees above freezing; a steady tap of meltwater on the porch roof. Crows. A blue, eye-shaped hole in the clouds eases shut.
Deer have been eating the wild rosebush again, and the yard is a maze of rabbit tracks. The fog lifts for a minute, then returns.
The dark-eyed juncos flock to the two dark wounds in all this white: the plowed road’s bare stone and the thin, quiet trickle of a stream.