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.
fog
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.
Thick fog. Snow melt-water drips onto the porch roof. A sudden scrabbling of squirrel claws on locust bark—that waterfall sound.
Warm rain. Fog rises from the melting snowpack, lifting and sinking in obedience to imperceptible changes in the air.
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.
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.
Rain and fog. Two bucks stand among the trees, antlers dripping as they lower their heads for a better look at the doe lying in the weeds.
Silent as a thief, this sun climbing through the trees. The fog lifted an hour ago, but steam still rises from the yellow leaves.
The thin fog turns blue before disappearing. At the woods’ edge, ants rise on filmy wings like a curl of smoke.
The snow that began falling at 6:00 has softened to slush; the skunk prints that crossed the garden are gone. Fog fills the woods.
A cloud has settled in and delegated to the trees its responsibility to rain. Some restless animal gnaws on a beam under the house.
Dull yellow stripes in the fog: the rising sun slipping between ridge-top trees; thin tulip poplar branches chewed bare by a porcupine.
Out of the dense fog, the too-fast-to-count taps of a woodpecker drumming for the music of it. He pauses to let a train whistle blow.
Thick fog and a slow dripping of meltwater onto the porch roof. Some of the animal tracks in the yard have melted through—dark portholes.