An hour before dawn, the new-fallen snow glows yellow with the light from town. The crescent moon appears through a hole in the clouds.
6°F. A patch of weeds furred with hoarfrost alerts me to a hole in the yard I didn’t know about: a burrow? An underground spring?
Keening moans from the hole in the big walnut tree. Then snarls: a squirrel rockets out, falls to a lower limb. The moans grow louder.
Fire engines wailing through the gap, air horns, the frantic melisma of ambulances. The wind blows snow against my cheek—pinpricks of cold.
It’s snowing. A pileated woodpecker drums twice in Margaret’s yard: a resonant timpanum. Then sleet: rapid brushes on a taut skin.
A squirrel chased off the bird feeder races all the way to the dead elm in my yard, where it sits perfectly still for the next ten minutes.
Cold, clear, and still. Three dark silhouettes of deer half-running, half-dancing through the laurel with the sun-flooded powerline beyond.
After three months of being written about daily, the world glimpsed from my porch seems more recondite than ever. Slow diatoms of snow.
Siren, train whistle, a red-bellied woodpecker ululating in the yard. It’s snowing. Squirrel tracks cross the porch in front of my chair.
Late to rise, I get a faceful of sun. Sparkles on the frosted snowpack only inhabit the glare between the shadows, like stars on strike.
A jeering band of bluejays lands in the locusts. Of human noise, nothing but distant jets. Long fingers of sunlight between the trees.
Cloud-bellies at sunrise: white, yellow, blue-gray, mauve. We’re back to cold weather, and only the house finch sounds happy to be alive.
Just out of sight through the dripping woods, something dangerous must be passing: a succession of deer blast its odor from their nostrils.
Gray sky at sunrise. The porcupine is late; I watch it coming from a long way off. It pauses to chew on the porch—no taste like home!