A large red blot has blossomed on the garden’s snow. I find tufts of silky brown fur and three drops of blood in a line toward the woods.
A morning for woodpeckers: I hear the trilling of a red-bellied, the cackling of a pileated, and a downy’s steady trepanning of a maple.
Thick fog prolongs the early-morning light for hours. The cardinal sings spring while a screech owl quavers over the luminous snow.
That metronome-like sound—could it possibly be a chipmunk? I cup hands to my ears: no, it’s just slow meltwater. But the clock is ticking.
The nasal call of a jay became the soundtrack of happiness one sun-drenched afternoon of my childhood. The place is gone now—a subdivision.
Fresh excavations in the yard—a puzzle. Have the deer developed a taste for myrtle, the green of its leathery leaves under all that snow?
Late morning, and the gray gives way to deepest blue. Treetops clack like rib-bone castanets, gleaming in the sun.
The dog statue in the yard is still buried except for its vigilant tail. On either side, the excavations of deer.
I strain to hear the waking birds, but sound is out of the west: cars, trucks, winter tires—the fossil-fueled Fat Tuesday that never ends.
Fine powder on the wind. The locust tree at the woods’ edge is suddenly full of creaks, like a lapsed Trappist relearning how to talk.
Bright midmorning. Among the shadows in my yard, one patch of light that’s almost barren of sparkles: reflection from a second-story window.
Gray mid-morning, and the sound of bells comes and goes on the wind. A downy woodpecker telegraphs his hunger from a limb of the big maple.
My eyes water from lack of sleep, and the sun too looks bleary, shining through clouds. A sudden loud sigh from the vicinity of the pines.
A silent ordnance drifting on the wind crumbles on impact against my legs. I suddenly realize I haven’t heard a Carolina wren in weeks.