Overcast and cool. I’m outside for an hour and there’s no point at which something—chipmunk, squirrel, towhee, siren—isn’t signalling alarm.
chipmunks
Deer follow their long-legged shadows through the trees. Three phoebes chase through the branches and three chipmunks through the leaf duff.
The stone wall chipmunk keeps sneaking onto the territory of the road bank chipmunk, then fleeing back across the yard—a striped blur.
Colder than yesterday, but the last bones of snow still didn’t survive the night. A chipmunk takes fright, tail up like an exclamation mark.
Chickadees twittering back and forth in the birches. In the snow beside my chair, the small, intricately clawed tracks of a chipmunk.
So many chipmunks are racing about at the woods’ edge that after watching them for a while, I begin to feel itchy. A crow clears its throat.
Weak sunlight. Dead leaves are all a-rustle, rummaged through by squirrels, voles, chipmunks, juncos. The distant cry of a maybe killdeer.
Chipmunks coming into heat chase each other over the bright, melting snow. I recall that their name comes from the Ojibwe for “headlong.”
Sunny and cold. A chipmunk’s awake, racing over the snow at the woods’ edge. Icicles fall from the roof and shatter with a festive tinkling.
The cold has returned, but not soon enough to save the snow cover. The chipmunk darts across the road, cheeks puffed out with weed seeds.
After rain in the night, a clearing wind at sunrise. The woods is now more brown than white. A chipmunk zips across a patch of snow.
Bright and still. A wren pops out of the cherry snag next the porch. Two chipmunks bound through the dead grass and disappear into the wall.
The sun moves through the foggy woods like a spider at the center of her web. The hollow tocks of chipmunks up and down the hillside.
Bright sun after last night’s long-awaited rain. A chipmunk races down the road with cheek pouches bulging. A wood pewee’s melancholy call.