Overcast and still. A squirrel running across the road drops the frozen walnut in her teeth, and it rolls along by itself for a few feet. Up on the ridge, a tree pops from the cold.
cold
Cold and still. The sun is a bright smudge slowly shrinking into a blaze as the clouds thin out. A train horn blows an almost perfect minor chord.
Clear and cold, with a breeze out of the north. I get my winter coat out of storage, make clouds with my breath. Church bells from town toll the hour.
Dawn. The thermometer has dropped to 50°F (10°C). Something small and dark disappears into the tall weeds beside the driveway, setting off first one, then the other Carolina wren. It never reemerges. The sun comes up.
Sunrise gutters in a gray bank of clouds. It’s cold. My breath hangs in the air like winter’s ghost.
Below freezing still, and the sky more clear than not. Up on the ridge, a hermit thrush is singing: faint chimes, as if some gate to paradise had a doorbell.
Deep cold at dawn. Icicles hanging from the eaves bend this way and that. The trees creak and groan. The chip, chip of a cardinal waking up.
Two below zero, and at least two gray squirrels are in heat now. I watch a suitor bound over the snow and into the trees, leaping from the twiggy end of one limb to another, finding a way.
Zero at dawn, and very quiet. Finally a nuthatch pipes up, followed by a junco. From inside the tall locust tree behind the springhouse, the muffled scolding of red squirrels.
A half moon all alone in thin clouds like a lost knife. The plank wall of the house behind me pops from the cold.
A fresh scurf of snow on the porch. The trees with their moon-shadows stretching east like dark carpets rolled out for the rumored sun. All the old aches in my body. It’s cold.
The deep cold has returned, bringing silence and a bitter wind. The just-past-full moon slips behind a cloud in the west and never returns. From under the house, the sound of gnawing.
Trees creak and clatter in the growing light. Somewhere nearby, freezing sap is trapped and the heartwood bursts, loud as a rifle shot.
Bitter cold with a wind. The happy sounds of juncos coming down to drink from the spring’s thin trickle. Overhead, a faint wash of pink.