The earth is brown again, and the hillside hidden in fog. A one-minute rain shower. Nuthatches chatter. The sun makes a bleary appearance.
fog
Steady rain. The fog retreats 100 yards up the hillside without seeming to move, trees like a flash mob suddenly emerging from anonymity.
Fog and rain. The stream runs brown, as if to match the woods and meadow. The pink flamingo in my garden is looking distinctly out of place.
Cold rain and fog. A flock of grackles wheels low over the house—the sudden waterfall sound of their wings all turning at once.
Thick fog, and the road gray with sleet that fell in the night. Three red-bellied woodpeckers are whinnying back and forth in the treetops.
A flock of Canada geese somewhere in the clouds like a ghost army led by rusty bugles. A speeding white car emerges from the fog.
Cold rain is once again erasing the snow. Off in the fog, the neighbor’s rooster crows like a conquistador laying claim to the bare ground.
Fog blurs the distinction between white ground and white sky. The distant drum roll of a pileated woodpecker followed by a patter of rain.
The clouds that settled in yesterday haven’t lifted, their slow drift barely perceptible through the shifting clarity of the trees.
Fog like a soundproof room. As always, the dead cherry’s five splayed stumps are giving the middle finger to the road—to whatever comes.
Fog heightens the intrigue of January’s gray-squirrel soap opera: the slow-motion chases, the tree-top fights, the ruses to elude stalkers.
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.
I have to wipe the fog off my chair before I can sit. After a while, it begins to rain. In the dead meadow weeds, a commentary of sparrows.
The flashing light on the meter-reader’s truck emerges from the fog. The meadow is dotted with the white, inverted tents of funnel spiders.