Bright sun, heavy frost. Down in the hollow, a screech owl calls as persistently as if it were midnight. I take deep breaths of the icy air.
frost
From under a hat brim ablaze with sun, I gaze out at the stiltgrass glazed with frost. Jays in the treetops. Falling acorns tick and tock.
Heavy frost blurs the difference between snow-free meadow and woods, where a white fur lingers. The distant stutter of a Jake-braking truck.
Thick hoarfrost gives the sun rising through the trees a soft, glittery nimbus, and the aging snowpack has regained the sparkle of youth.
The hollow echoes with the roar of traffic. Odd how the sun can rise through the trees in total silence, turning a heavy frost into mist.
Hoarfrost costumes the yard, sparkling in the sun for a few minutes of glory. Oaks that looked brown under clouds glow orange and red again.
Sun through thin, high clouds—light for a much milder morning than this one in which periwinkle leaves glitter with melting hoarfrost.
Sunrise turns the western ridge red. A squirrel falls out of a walnut tree and lands with a thump in weeds white with the first frost.
Bright and still; the meadow glitters with frost. Behind the house, a deer sniffs then licks a fallen pear and turns away.
Melted frost shining like dew on the lilac. A deer trots down the road and into the yard to graze, raising her head to keep an eye on me.
Last night’s heavy frost retreats to the shade. By 10:30, sparrows are bathing in the stream, shaking themselves dry in the sunlit dogwood.
A galaxy of sparkles in the yard where the sunlight hits a patch of frost. The fourth-quarter moon hangs low over the trees. A grouse drums.
-21C. With the inner door open, frost forms on the storm door in minutes. The sun through the trees is spiky as a Medieval implement of war.
Frost on the grass like mildew. An echoey rasping sound that can only be a squirrel chiseling at a black walnut shell inside a hollow tree.