At first light, some large animal crunching through the snowpack at the woods’ edge. It slows, stops. I wait for daybreak: nothing there.

At half-light, small explosions of wings and twittering from around the side of the house as birds leave their roosts in the cedar tree.

Tracks left yesterday morning have grown blurry and distended. Every weed and grass stem is a bull’s-eye at the center of a pit.

In the pre-dawn darkness, the wall of trees is in motion, like a silent waterfall. I’m either having an acid flashback, or it’s snowing.

Like sand in an hourglass this pellet snow. Three craters in the yard—grass, leaves—from something that’s trying to turn back the clock.

The promised snowstorm has yet to arrive. The air is dead still, and an hour after daybreak, the ground remains lighter than the sky.

The sun glimmers from a shrinking patch of open sky along the horizon. Lake-bottom wrecks, in another minute the icy lid will cover us all.

A few hours above freezing yesterday, and the snowpack lost its ability to absorb sound. I sit in the dark listening to the roar of trucks.

Fingers of sunlight stretch across the yard. The resident naturalist climbs the trail into the woods with the aid of a long thin stick.