Cold and still at sunrise. A chipmunk pops up from under the house and scuttles over to the stone wall, where it stops to watch the clouds turn colors.
clouds
Impossible to distinguish the sound of the ridgetop wind from the rumble of freight trains below. The stars fade. A small high cloud turns pink.
Very cold and still. The clear sky at dawn has gone white. Crows call to crows. The floorboards shiver when my furnace kicks on.
A filigreed fretwork of wet snow clinging to everything. From the valley, the wail of sirens. The cloud cover thins to a kind of brightness.
Very still under a bone-white sky. A Carolina wren rummages under the house. In the treetops a gray squirrel takes an improbable leap.
Unseasonably warm and very quiet. Sunrise appears through a rift in the clouds: gold in the east, black in the west. The last five piles of icy snow look as out of place as alien spacecrafts.
Dawn clouds stacked liked a ladder of blood. Chattering nuthatches. A dove’s breathy song sounds far from mournful.
It’s the last overcast dawn for days, they say, so I try to find something to savor in the cold gloom, among the rumbles of distant machines and the one-note whistles of dove wings.
Just past sunrise the sky almost clears, then clouds over again. The thermometer’s black arrow points straight at 32. The mound of plowed slow at the edge of the yard looks lost and abandoned, like Lot’s wife after she glanced back.
As below, so above, the trees marooned in a flat whiteness no less absolute than that of a blank page, albeit one navigated by squirrels.
After a night of snow and rain, trees rock and clatter under orange clouds. The roof drips. Scattered flakes swirl past.
The Carolina wren who sleeps above my laundry-room door forms a one-bird cheering section for the sunrise. Then the cloud-lid closes, and only the creek still sings.
Heavy gray clouds, and a breeze from the east: storm coming. Something flushes all the doves from the spring—a euphony of bright notes.
The cloud ceiling briefly switches to faint pastels: sunrise. One yammering nuthatch and, from down in the hollow, a screech owl’s soft trill.