Cold and damp. The distant rumble of the heating oil truck’s diesel engine coming up the hollow. Voices of crows. Voices of children.
American crow
Cold and gloomy, but the yard seethes with birds: juncos, cardinals, wren. A hundred yards away, a hawk sits on a limb, bedeviled by crows.
The fog is a bad magician. Each time it lifts, it reveals the same trees and snow, the same skinny squirrels, the same two crows jeering.
Fine snow settling over everything. From up in the woods, strange, high-pitched cries. Two crows fly off. The snow thickens.
Winter’s back. You can see it in the dash of snow and thick crust of clouds, hear it in the train’s horn and the querulous cries of crows.
Mackerel clouds above then across the sun like a face consumed by worry lines. The caws of a crow echo off the thawed and refrozen hillside.
Sun-glare on the snow; a bitter wind. A crow mob up on the ridge disperses, only to return a half hour later to whatever they’re tormenting.
Ground and sky are the same flat white aside from a smear of sun. Down-hollow, a mob of crows. A squirrel hurls itself through the treetops.
Low and heavy clouds. A red-tailed hawk circling over the field flaps to gain altitude, ignored by a wind-buffeted flock of crows.
The traffic noise is deafening; even the crows are hard to hear. The air starts to shimmer with what Chinese call maomaoyu—fine-hair rain.
Sunny and cool. Two crows drive a third out of the pines with a low-in-the-throat noise that would sound threatening in any language.
So many chipmunks are racing about at the woods’ edge that after watching them for a while, I begin to feel itchy. A crow clears its throat.
Fog gives back to the forest those soft edges and sense of distance that were lost when the leaves came down. Rain taps on the roof. A crow.
Drizzle on snow—a phrase that, moved to the kitchen, sounds almost enticing. Christmas has come early for a crow excited about the compost.