Weak sun through thickening clouds. A robin and his echo. The metallic taps of a titmouse opening a sunflower seed against a drainpipe.
clouds
Humid and cool. The sun keeps finding new holes in the clouds. The woodpeckers keep drumming.
10F/-12C but the wind has mostly died. The plastic flamingo leans only slightly askew in the snowy garden. Patches of blue converge overhead.
Clear everywhere except where the sun rises pink, orange and yellow, heralded by small woodpeckers with loud, locust-wood drums.
A leaden sky at sunrise, but an hour later, the sun glimmers through thinning clouds. Cardinal and titmouse song. The smell of bare dirt.
A faint dusting of snow on a ground otherwise mostly brown again. It’s just below freezing. The sun makes a dramatic entrance from beneath a curtain of cloud.
The sky clears at about the same rate as caffeine clears my head—a transitory state, no doubt, and host to a mob of crows.
A leaden sky slowly lightening toward midday. A wintry mix is coming and the birds know it: juncos in the driveway swallowing tiny stones.
Sun shining through thin, high clouds. An inversion layer turns the rumble of a freight train into something I can feel in my chest.
Clear and still. The stream has subsided from a roar to a babble: one inmate instead of the whole asylum. The first, skinny clouds.
Mid-morning. A large cloud over-brimming with golden light serves as ambassador for an advancing army of gray.
Scattered snowflakes like free-range musical notation for scattered chirps—chickadee, nuthatch. A hint of sunrise fading from the clouds.
Clouds going from pink to orange to yellow as the sky turns paler blue, all to the sound of running water and the whistling of doves’ wings.
The first flakes, fine as flour, from a dull gray sky: far edge of the predicted blizzard. A silent crow flies over. A woodpecker knocks.