A flat-white sky crossed by the occasional crow. From the other house, finch chatter at the feeder erupts and subsides every few minutes.
clouds
The warmest morning in weeks. Under a gray-wool sky, two gray squirrels climb slowly together up one of the tallest woods-edge trees—in the mood, it seems, for love.
A wedge of yellow light in the clouds for half an hour past sunrise. I’m learning to spot when a squirrel is about to dig up a nut: it stares off into space in one last effort to convince any watcher that it’s doing something entirely different.
An hour past sunrise, the clouds are darker closer to the horizon. Three crows are having an argument in the treetops that ends with one of them angrily leaving the premises. The hiss of wind.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
A fresh inch and a half of dry snow, and the bitter wind that bore it now ushering a flotilla of orange clouds across a sky of startling blue. From my mother’s house, the murmur of voices on the radio like a distant surf, accompanied not by the cries of gulls but the chatter of house finches.
Bare trees dance wildly in the wind, branches clacking like castanets. Snowmelt dripping from the roof flies back up toward the fast-moving clouds.
Cold, overcast, and quieter even than Christmas day. An hour past sunrise, the sky brightens a little. Two crows fly past, yelling. The gloom returns.
Cold, quiet, and mostly clear for the solstice. Small clouds turn blood-red at dawn, fade to yellow, then turn a lurid orange at sunrise. A red squirrel pauses at the edge of the porch to glare at me.
Patches of blue sky open and close as snowmelt drips from the roof. An oak leaf cartwheels up the icy driveway.
Sunday-morning silence deepened by fresh snow, with flakes still flurrying about. A band of orange appears in the clouds. The furnace under the house rumbles to life.
Waiting for a weather system that stays west of the Allegheny Front, I give up on the chance of snow, go in just as the sun burns through the clouds—a smear of blaze.
The sky and ground nearly rhyme in their oppressive whiteness. A red squirrel sounds as if he’s having a psychotic break, trying to defend a hollow black locust no doubt stuffed with acorns and walnuts.
An hour past sunrise, there’s a growing radiance as blue sky spreads in the west. Even after all these years of wildlife-watching, I can’t stop marvelling at the acrobatics and shenanigans of gray squirrels.