I pause at the door, coffee in hand: six juncos decorate the dead cherry, fat, motionless. A pileated woodpecker cackles at the wood’s edge.
juncos
Freezing rain and fog. Snowbirds crowd the melted tire tracks in the gravel driveway, filling their gizzards wth grit while they can.
Sun! And clouds thinning to snow-gauze on their leeward sides. A junco tries to fly into the wind, turns sidewise, lands with a chirp.
By midmorning, all the white crosses left by jets have disappeared into another cloudless sky. A soft bang as a junco side-swipes a window.
Cloudless at sunrise except for my puffs of breath. A junco with bright new plumage flies out of the woods and veers past my face, chirping.
Sweating in the 50-degree heat, my head swims with a literal spring fever. I envy the juncos hopping on a patch of snow, their quiet notes.
Fine as powdered sugar, this snow. Juncos wallow in it. A Carolina wren lands on a snowy branch, ruffles its feathers, and does not sing.
Yesterday’s slush has grown hard as cartilage. I watch a small flock of snowbirds hopping around on it, unfazed by the bitter wind.
A squirrel places a walnut in a small high crotch in the lilac and departs, like the Andrew Goldsworthy of squirrels. A junco lands, looks.
The local geese seem restless, flying from valley to valley as if trying to remember how to migrate. Four juncos in the road gathering grit.
Juncos foraging in the snow. One flies up to the branch nearest to my chair and inches sideways, its down coat puffed out against the cold.