A white sky except where the sun blazes, whiter than white. A helicopter’s loud, bladed flower. In its wake, the scattered cries of geese.
clouds
The clouds begin to fray, letting the sun through. It’s cold again. A small piece of sandstone sits on the end of my porch like a message, I’m not sure from whom.
Which will last longest: the snow banks piled up by the plow or by the wind? It’s almost below freezing again, with shifting patches of light and dark overhead like a deck of cards being shuffled.
Misty and gray, with endless commentary from crows. The sun appears for half a minute without coming fully out, as pileated woodpeckers cackle in the yard.
Overcast with bright patches among the gray. The thaw continues, as if it might be early spring. The bird app hallucinates a red-winged blackbird.
A gray sky gravid with rain. A gray squirrel pops out of a hole in the yard, walnut between its teeth. Up in the woods, a chipmunk zips across the snow.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
Thaw. The snowpack has shrunk by about half, and the snowplowed banks that flank the road have opened their dark dirt hearts. The gray sky turns faintly pink as the wind picks up.
A heavy, gray sky that from time to time emits a shimmer of fine precipitation. Woodpeckers’ rhythms turn irregular as they move from their drumming trees to their dining trees. A bit of highway noise for the first time in a week.
Cold and still as the last few yellow-bellied clouds sail off. A fast raven chase goes over, trailing metallic shrieks. The sun clears the ridge and all the trees don their blue shadows.
Quiet except for the wingbeats of a raven. When the icy breeze dies, my breath begins to freeze to my glasses. Sun-sparkles in the snow fall victim to a bank of clouds.
The deep cold continues, with a fresh dusting of snow on the porch and high, thin clouds that sap the sun of its blaze. A bitter wind slips in under my coat.
Sunrise sky like an illuminated manuscript: that blue, that gold leaf. The red squirrel pokes its head out of its hole in the black locust behind the spinghouse to give everything a resounding scold.
In deep cold and silence, entranced by sun-sparkle and the slow shadow-play of trees in the yard, I nearly turn into the Simpsons meme, Old Man Yells at Clouds.