In thick fog, the bright flesh of lilac and tulip tree limbs barked by squirrels for their nests. The last few patches of snow look as bedraggled as old bandages.
gray squirrel
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
A gray sky gravid with rain. A gray squirrel pops out of a hole in the yard, walnut between its teeth. Up in the woods, a chipmunk zips across the snow.
Clear and still. A squirrel crouched in the lowest crotch of the closest black walnut tree works on her breakfast walnut, tail arched back into a headdress as spiky as the rising sun that sets it aglow.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
The warmest morning in weeks: less than ten degrees below freezing! White ground, gray sky, and from at least three directions, the sound of gnawing.
A slow snowfall that never quite quits as I sit enjoying the balmy temperature—just seven degrees below freezing!—and the continuing, slow-motion courtship of the squirrels.
Three or four slow-moving squirrels crowd onto the big tulip tree. But there’s a loner 50 feet away, diving repeatedly into the snow as if unable to locate a buried nut. After a while, he retreats into the canopy to eat black birch seeds.
Cold and mostly gray. A gray squirrel at the end of the porch tries and fails to muster the courage to walk past me, approaching, retreating, studying me like the weather.
A cold, white expanse of sky with one small blaze off through the trees. It’s quiet. A squirrel chiseling a walnut shell is the loudest thing.
Unable to read due to flying snow, I start a collection of asterisks in my lap. When the wind dies, I can hear my mother yelling at the squirrels.
An hour past sunrise, the sun finally hits my porch. A gray squirrel is hectoring all and sundry about some long-gone hawk. The cardinal sings.
The warmest morning in weeks. Under a gray-wool sky, two gray squirrels climb slowly together up one of the tallest woods-edge trees—in the mood, it seems, for love.
A wedge of yellow light in the clouds for half an hour past sunrise. I’m learning to spot when a squirrel is about to dig up a nut: it stares off into space in one last effort to convince any watcher that it’s doing something entirely different.