Fog and a fine drizzle. A monarch butterfly, oranger than any leaf in view, glides past in the wrong direction. The cheep cheep of a peeper.
fog
Thin fog. A lone blue jay’s querulous call. A tiny white moth flies past, its wings a blur. One expects to hear the purr of a tiny motor.
Mid-morning, and the trees still glisten from the dawn fog. A breeze sends hundreds of birch leaves swirling out into the meadow.
A half moon high overhead, fading as the fog rises off the meadow. A nuthatch lands on the dead elm’s smooth trunk and turns all about.
Foggy at dawn. When I open the door, a Carolina wren zips out of the old hornets’ nest under the porch roof and disappears into the lilac.
Dawn. Thin fog infiltrates the trees’ pointillist green. A whip-poor-will calls at the woods’ edge with the absolute conviction of the mad.
Cold rain and fog. A squirrel disappears into the old flicker den hole in the dead elm, that smooth, ruined column at the edge of the yard.
On a hillside once again nearly snow-free, the fog withdraws, advances and surrounds like the subtlest of foes. A phoebe’s insistent song.
Fog settles in, full of the labor of freight trains. Snow mounded up by the plow rots in the otherwise bare yard like a white whale carcass.
Sun shining through fog. The garden-wall chipmunk must be in heat: two suitors battle for her attention in what’s left of the snow.
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.
An ostinato of dripping on the porch roof. The fog advances, retreats. Somewhere a deer snorts. Drenched squirrels bound over the slush.
The earth is brown again, and the hillside hidden in fog. A one-minute rain shower. Nuthatches chatter. The sun makes a bleary appearance.
Steady rain. The fog retreats 100 yards up the hillside without seeming to move, trees like a flash mob suddenly emerging from anonymity.