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.
clouds
Cold and overcast, but with a broad palette of grays. Two geese go over, one silent, the other bugling non-stop. I resist the urge to check the news.
A gray sunrise, signalled only by the yelling of crows. After yesterday’s warmth, the ground is more brown than white. The wind picks up, clattering through the treetops.
Cold and very quiet, with a blue sky slowly fading to white. A vulture drifts past the sun without flapping a wing.
Mostly clear and mostly quiet. A squirrel summits a 20-foot-tall stump and looks all about. The three small clouds turn red.
Wind and thaw. Fat clouds sail over with bright orange prows and dark bellies. A dead leaf makes circles in the corner of the porch.
A sunrise in layers of orange and gray makes the absence of color below in the snow seem absolutely surreal. Three crows fly over the house. The furnace rumbles awake.
Sunrise reddens a third of the sky. The male cardinal, clearly in his glory, holds forth.
Overcast with a slightly less gray patch in the east. The smoke from my chimney sinks to the ground and drifts off through the trees: some weather’s on the way.
Overcast, cold and still. A pair of amorous squirrels climb slowly up and down the trees at the woods’ edge. I take it on faith that the sun has risen.
Cold with a patchwork sky in which some pink appears and fades. The red squirrel scolds from its hole high in a locust as a gray squirrel leaps from birch to birch.
Big winds are rummaging through the treetops for a dawn chorus of squeaks and groans. A bright wedge opens in the clouds. The wren wakes up.
Clouds like a thick, gray quilt. The creek has sunk to a whisper, and the threadbare snowpack crackles like wax paper under the squirrels’ feet.
Overcast, but with more brightness than gloom. On the forest floor, a barely-there lacework of snow. Somewhere in between, a goldfinch’s warble.