Bitter cold. A garlic mustard skeleton hanging over the small hole in the yard that goes down to an underground stream is shaggy with frost.
cold
Very cold and still. Just when I think the birds will never wake, the clouds redden a little and a nuthatch fires up its querulous engine.
Zero degrees. Sun through bare branches—a shining fur of hoarfrost. Two ravens fly in low and circle my mother’s house.
The coldest morning of the year so far. Every few minutes, a tree with ice in its heartwood cracks like a gunshot. The ridge turns pink.
Clear and cold: -16C/3F. Two white-breasted nuthatches exchange notes. The smoke from my chimney slinks along the ground toward the south.
My first morning back since the New Year: clear, still, and bitter cold. The stream’s gurgle. The enthusiasm of small birds for the sunrise.
A wren calls under the porch. It’s five degrees below freezing. An inversion layer brings the whine of tires over the ridge, red with sunrise.
Cold and very still. Every leaf in the myrtle patch—Grandma’s legacy—is edged in white. Sunrise stains the western ridge blood-red.
25F degrees at dawn. A bat flies low over the meadow as the white-throated sparrows tune up. Frost-encrusted blades of grass seem to glow.
Two degrees above freezing with a dull gray sky—very Novemberish. Except the trees aren’t bare, the oaks yet to reach their peak of color.
Cold rain. I tap the thermometer and it drops another two degrees. The rattle of sleet gives way after a few minutes to the silence of snow.
Bitter wind. Up in the woods, sun glints off an old jar the frost heaved up. When I go to fetch it, ice colonnades crumble under my boots.
An hour before sunrise, the bitter wind says winter but the creek says spring. The moon’s gone flat, but is still as bright as a false dawn.
Bone-achingly cold. A squirrel navigating the tulip tree walks on the undersides of snowy limbs. Sunrise stains the western ridge blood-red.