ovenbird

Sunny and humid, as dark clouds move in from the west. The quiet wheeze of a black-and-white warbler. The first ovenbird’s strident chant.

On this date

Rising late, I catch the last of some new-snow magic dripping from the eaves. Friends arrive bearing sauerkraut. …

I find my chair where the wind left it at the far end of the porch with a cracked back. Dried cattail leaves flap like banners for the dead. …

A dusting of fresh graupel, and more flying past: like large grains of salt, or snowflakes which, tragically, are in no way unique. …

Cat tracks in the snow disappear under the house. The Carolina wrens have survived another cold snap; will they be killed in their sleep? …

Heavy frost blurs the difference between snow-free meadow and woods, where a white fur lingers. The distant stutter of a Jake-braking truck. …

A raven croaks somewhere above the ridge. Snow fine as flour. A Brownian cloud of small birds scuds over the treetops: pine siskins. …

It's cold—I can hear it in the way the wind hisses in the dead grass. As the sun climbs through the trees, I close one eye then the other. …

Three inches of fresh snow, unmarred by a single human track. A scrabbling of claws: five squirrels on the trunk of a dead maple. …

My new glasses have some sort of prismatic coating. I turn my head and see a rainbow-banded sun rising east-northeast among the pines. …

Bands of blue move east and close just before the sun can enter them. Once, when the wind dies, it's completely quiet for fifteen seconds. …

Day 3 of the thaw. A month's worth of apple cores are beginning to surface. Inside on my computer screen, via webcam, a black bear sleeps. …

Clear at sunrise, and so cold the mucous freezes in my nostrils. Trees pop at random intervals. A good day to be a black bear, fast asleep. …

Spindly icicles glitter on the eaves, stunted by too little of the white soil they need to grow, thinned by too much of the life-giving sun. …

The Morning Porch