Last night’s snow has left a scant half-inch of fur on all the trees—these naked sleepers. Some of it melts, some evaporates into fog.
fog
November 17, 2014
Over the drumming of rain on the roof, a white-throated sparrow’s quavering song. The fog settles in, gray and inescapable as secret police.
November 6, 2014
Rain and fog. A dead branch gives way under the weight of seven jays, who fly up screaming as it crashes to the ground.
October 2, 2014
Another foggy morning. Beneath the orange leaves of the witch hazel in my garden, yellow blossoms are beginning to let down their wild hair.
September 15, 2014
Droplets of fog, back-lit by the sun, stream upward into the blue like reverse rain. At the woods’ edge, a migrant phoebe clears its throat.
August 26, 2014
Blue sky above the fog. The sun stretches long white spider legs into the woods. The cackle of a pileated woodpecker, followed by wingbeats.
August 21, 2014
Sun shining through fog and the growing tents of fall webworms. A sharp-shinned hawk sits atop the dead elm, his head swiveling all around.
April 12, 2014
Clear sky at sunrise, but the woods are still dripping. The sun sets the mist aglow. Trembling drops shift from color to color, prismatic.
April 8, 2014
Half an hour till sunrise. Over the brassy din of the dooryard birds, from off in the fog, the soft, wandering warble of a winter wren.
March 12, 2014
Fog and steady rain. A drenched gray squirrel bounds across what’s left of the snow and clears the rushing stream with a flying leap.
January 11, 2014
Thick fog. Snow melt-water drips onto the porch roof. A sudden scrabbling of squirrel claws on locust bark—that waterfall sound.
December 21, 2013
Warm rain. Fog rises from the melting snowpack, lifting and sinking in obedience to imperceptible changes in the air.
December 9, 2013
After 15 hours of freezing fog, every twig is spiky with eldritch feathers. A squirrel makes a small thunder by running on the crusted snow.
December 4, 2013
Small birds appear as they fly past, and the sun, too, emerges only to vanish a second later, the fog turning from yellow back to white.