Bright and cold. Gusts of wind sweep the snow off branches—ghosts among the trees. A jet’s vestigial contrail briefly underlines the sun.
cold
After the coldest night of the year so far, I’m basking in the bright sunlight, listening to the quiet hops of a junco approaching my chair.
Very cold (-20C). A locust tree with ice in its joints creaks and bangs in the wind. Through a hat and two hoods I hear a cardinal singing.
Cold again after yesterday’s thaw. A mourning dove flutters down into the lilac, gets settled on a branch and closes its eyes.
Clear and very cold. The wind has erased all tracks but its own, and the trees’ etiolated shadows rock back and forth like trauma survivors.
Shrunk in the cold, the porch floorboards pop loudly when I come out. In my snowshoe tracks below the porch, a scattering of rabbit pellets.
Another zero-degree morning. The wind hisses in the tops of the pines. A blue jay squeaks like a rusty hinge. The sun comes up.
The thermometer hovers just above zero F. Drifted snow covers the porch. A lone squirrel leaps through the shadows of the trees.
Wind and sun and bitter cold. A faint trace of white on the ground, as if left over from last night’s full moon.
The rasping cries of male squirrels trailing a female in estrus through the treetops. I can feel my breath freezing to my beard.
Bitter cold; even the sun looks brittle. I savor the silence, broken only by goldfinch warble and the scattered calls of robins.
Cold and still. Even with no snow, the light is already wintry: low-angled, flooding the open woods, illuminating the wings of small birds.
Overcast and cold. On the south side of the house, an aster is still in bloom, its small constellation trembling in the wind.
A katydid clings to the side of the house at sunrise, its veined leaf of a body immobile in the cold but still as green as July.