Clear and still, despite the madness of clocks losing an hour. Woodpecker drums. A squirrel rummaging through last year’s leaves.
gray squirrel
An hour after sunrise and the squirrels are mostly back in their burrows. Weak sunlight on a snowfall fine as flour. A mourning dove calls.
The slow fall of small snowflakes never quite stops. A squirrel with a half a tail bounds past, carrying his freshy disinterred breakfast: a black lump of frozen walnut.
Mostly clear and mostly quiet. A squirrel summits a 20-foot-tall stump and looks all about. The three small clouds turn red.
Two below zero, and at least two gray squirrels are in heat now. I watch a suitor bound over the snow and into the trees, leaping from the twiggy end of one limb to another, finding a way.
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.
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.