Snow in the air and here and there on the ground: unseasonable seasoning. A gray squirrel bounds up the gray road, all smoke and tailpipe.
gray squirrel
April 3, 2018
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.
March 21, 2018
It’s the absence of sound that makes a snowstorm so disquieting. A squirrel plows its way through snow-laden treetops—a slow-moving cascade.
March 18, 2018
A squirrel leaps out of a tree, falls 20 feet to the ground and runs off. The dog stares mournfully at a pool of bile she’s just thrown up.
February 28, 2018
Bright sun on bare trees, whose discarded leaves still glow. Squirrels scold on and on. Finally a hawk-shaped shadow detaches from an oak.
February 24, 2018
It has stopped raining. The squirrel with pale fur forages at the edge of a small, marooned cloud. The sky brightens and releases more rain.
February 21, 2018
Shirt-sleeve weather. A squirrel unearths a walnut from the yard in that casual way squirrels have of pretending it’s doing something else.
February 19, 2018
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.
February 11, 2018
An ostinato of dripping on the porch roof. The fog advances, retreats. Somewhere a deer snorts. Drenched squirrels bound over the slush.
February 7, 2018
Steady sleet. A squirrel bores into the frozen earth to retrieve a black walnut, then schleps the battered, lumpy thing into the treetops.
January 31, 2018
In the stillness, the rasp of squirrel teeth. Then the hollow thonk, thonk of a dropped walnut hitting the limbs of an oak on its way down.
January 18, 2018
A tangle of tracks in the yard: rabbit, cat, squirrel, mouse… I’m not picturing a children’s book, but each creature fearful and alone.
January 12, 2018
Rain has erased the snow. High in a black locust, a squirrel is biting off twigs and carrying them into a crotch, building a bed of thorns.
January 7, 2018
A squirrel in the treetops pauses before it leaps, gazing, and loses its nerve. Below, bars of sunlight stretch across the pale blue ground.