Thin, high clouds—enough to blur the edges of shadows. Whenever the robin pauses for breath, I can hear a phoebe calling up by the barn. Spring is here.
clouds
Overcast at sunrise, the clouds begin to show cracks of blue. A song sparrow continues with his hip-hip-hurrahing long after the others have gone off to forage.
A gray-wool sky, periodically crossed by Vs of geese. The snowpack has shrunk to an archipelago of white ice. A neighbor’s chicken is crowing over her latest creation.
Sun and clouds and a turkey vulture rocking in the wind. Then the blue fissures close, and it’s another gray day.
A sky of pastel colors occasionally graced by a bleary sun. Strings of non-migrant, local Canada geese fly low over the trees, restless, their cries still full of elsewhere.
Heavily overcast with a steady drip of snowmelt. From one valley, the sound of trains; from the other, a killdeer. A snow goblin left by the plow topples over into the road.
Contrails fading to white after sunrise—toppled columns from a ruined temple. Three bugle notes from a lone goose. The dull roar of traffic.
Cold, thinly overcast, and very quiet. The spot where the sun must be glows like a yellow door among the ridgetop trees.
The winds that buffeted the house all night have mostly retreated to the ridgetop—a distant roar. A few, yellow-bellied clouds add their scattered flakes to the windblown snow drifting atop the ice. I hear my mother on her back porch yelling at the squirrels.
A faint shimmer of precipitation from a leaden sky. The vole in the yard is gathering more bedding. A white-throated sparrow sings once and falls silent.
Heavily overcast at sunrise. A meadow vole is busy with home improvement, popping out of the ground every minute or two to gather stiltgrass.
A dark sky at dawn with one bright gash. As it eases shut, an icy breeze springs up. The stream gurgles softly in its sleep.
Heavily overcast. A vole briefly surfaces in the yard, all dark fur and blur. A screech owl trills on the ridgetop where the sun should be.
The ground is white with sleet and graupel, and there’s a shimmer of rain from a sky like gray wool. A pileated woodpecker bursts out of the woods, cackling maniacally.