Thick fog alive with robin and red-winged blackbird song. The spring gurgles under the yard. The wingbeats of a crow pass overhead.
fog
Foggy and warm. Two nuthatches at the woods’ edge tangle in mid-air, tumbling a dozen feet before retreating to separate tree trunks. Near the top of the big tulip tree, a gray squirrel is leaping from limb to limb.
A mid-morning break in the rain. A red-winged blackbird calls once as the fog retreats to the ridgetop. Robins tut-tut. An altercation breaks out among the red-bellied woodpeckers.
The stream is loud with snowmelt and last night’s rain. The fog retreats up the hillside, leaving black birch trunks aglow in green lichen.
Fog lingering well into mid-morning. On the northwest-facing hillside, snow cover is down to about 50 percent: lacework, says my internal idealist. In tatters, the realist replies.
Misty and gray, with endless commentary from crows. The sun appears for half a minute without coming fully out, as pileated woodpeckers cackle in the yard.
The gray supremacy of fog, filtering out the valley’s noise, leaving only the drumming of woodpeckers and the low rumble of a jet high overhead.
Thick fog that lingers for hours, cancelling most noise except for the muffled taps of woodpeckers. A red squirrel nearly walks under my chair, then thinks better of it.
The rain peters out not long after sunrise. Fog retreats up the hill. A ladybird beetle wanders the folds of my barn coat.
Thick fog. A screech owl trills, seemingly in answer to the wren. Then crows join the chat. The owl’s trilling pauses, then resumes a quarter mile away.
Freezing fog that lifts after sunrise into a gray woolen sky, leaving frosted branches for the squirrels—gray or red, cautious or pell-mell.
Thick fog. When the wren stops singing, there’s dead silence for several minutes until a nuthatch calls. From father away, the death-cry of a rabbit.
Mist dissipating into blue. The walnut trees on the north side of the house are now nearly bare, even as the one on the south side is still more green than yellow. The sun briefly blazes through a new hole in the hillside canopy.
A knife-thin moon fades into the dawn sky. The only cloud huddles in the bottom corner of the meadow, where a phoebe is calling.