The banks of moss above the road shine bright after last night’s rain. Two chickadees sing their spring songs as snowflakes fill the air.
rain
February 24, 2019
Late morning and the rain stops, the fog lifts to reveal the same snow-clad mountain as before. The distant sound of an engine being revved.
February 8, 2019
Last night’s torrential rain has given way to wind, sunlight shimmering on the flooded stream and the waxy leaves of mountain laurel.
February 6, 2019
Cold rain; the snowpack is in tatters now. At the top of a locust snag, a gray squirrel’s tail waves and twitches like a mad flag.
January 24, 2019
Yesterday it was below freezing and rained; now it’s above freezing and snow is coming down: dilettantish at first, then in a mad dance.
January 23, 2019
A high-pitched train horn. The yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker. Almost imperceptibly, rain begins to tap on the snowpack’s icy lid.
January 8, 2019
Last night’s ice has melted, but the rain continues. A song sparrow sits in the barberry bush, gorging, emitting a chirp after each berry.
January 5, 2019
Staccato sounds: the distant drumming of a pileated woodpecker, a white-breasted nuthatch’s agitated call, rain tapping on the roof. Again.
December 16, 2018
It rained so hard last night, I dreamed the mountain had turned into a lake. Now it’s merely drizzling. Small birds forage in the treetops.
December 15, 2018
It’s our local Christmas Bird Count, so every drip of cold rain or moving shape off in the fog might be a bird. But none are.
December 2, 2018
Thick fog, returning to the forest its foreignness—the sense that any sound could be a footfall, that the rain is a many-legged beast.
November 26, 2018
Fog moves back and forth over the snow as the rain thickens. Two hunters emerge, a girl and her grandfather—blaze-orange among the gray.
October 28, 2018
A raven flies over the house, croaking. I keep wiping droplets of mist off the glossy pages of the book I’m reading about the holocaust.
October 27, 2018
Rain again. This is the dreariest, drabbest autumn I’ve ever seen—except for the moss and tree-bark lichens, which have never been brighter.