Snow starts in the gray dawn of a quiet Sunday, small flakes falling thickly, turning the road white again. Distant sirens. A squirrel crouches on a limb with its tail over its head.
gray squirrel
Overcast, cold and still. A pair of amorous squirrels climb slowly up and down the trees at the woods’ edge. I take it on faith that the sun has risen.
Not far below freezing. The sun appears through a keyhole in the clouds. A gray squirrel reaches into the snow and extracts a black walnut.
A fresh inch of snow, fallen in the small hours, gives the wind new wings. A patch of sky turns salmon a bit to the south of where the sun usually comes up. A squirrel runs along the snow-free underside of a limb.
Cold with a patchwork sky in which some pink appears and fades. The red squirrel scolds from its hole high in a locust as a gray squirrel leaps from birch to birch.
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.
Clouds like a thick, gray quilt. The creek has sunk to a whisper, and the threadbare snowpack crackles like wax paper under the squirrels’ feet.
Fog above the fresh snow—a paler shade of white. A gray squirrel thrusts her head into the ground and comes up with a white cap and a black walnut.
Gray and still, except for the creek’s trickle. A squirrel dangles from a low branch of the springhouse tulip tree, trying in vain to tear off a strip of bark.
Windy and cold, with gray squirrels leaping through the treetops. Half an hour past sunrise, the distant bugles of Canada geese draw my attention to a patch of blue sky.
Bitter cold and still at dawn, as the first silouette of a squirrel emerges from its nest of sticks and leaves high in the limbs of the big tulip and descends the tree, claws ticking against the bark. The clouds redden. A distant rifle booms.
Rain zebra-striped with snow; the woods more wet than white. A sodden squirrel trots down the road with a black walnut between her teeth.
One degree above freezing and very still. The sun’s slow climb through bare branches. The sound of gnawing rodent teeth in three directions.
Clear and cold. The red squirrel makes its usual racket while the gray squirrels leap silently through the treetops. The western ridge turns red.