Five degrees below freezing and heavily overcast. A thin, lispy note—some finch, I guess, high in the black locusts. The dry hiss of sleet.
sleet
2/25/2022
Drizzle falling on an inch of sleet: the ground is white again. A pileated woodpecker’s hollow toc toc toc.
1/17/2022
The tail-end of a storm that brought snow, sleet, freezing rain, and snow again. The trees look like they’ve been dipped in confectioner’s sugar.
4/21/2021
Cold rain. I tap the thermometer and it drops another two degrees. The rattle of sleet gives way after a few minutes to the silence of snow.
1/26/2021
Dawn. In the dim light, a pitter-patter of freezing rain slowly turns into the dry whisper of sleet, then the hush of snow — and back again.
3/23/2020
Rain mingled with the ticking of sleet. The early daffodils cluster together, heads nodding, like youths defying a social-distancing order.
4/5/2019
Rain seasoned with sleet. The trapped balloons hang limply from their dead tree, wrinkled like over-ripe fruit.
3/31/2019
Snow mixed with sleet. The feral balloons have wrapped themselves more tightly around their tree—a classic trade of freedom for security.
11/15/2018
Falling snow infiltrated by sleet—that clicking like a room full of typists. A jay has sole custody of the color blue—his two-note solo.
11/9/2018
A sudden fusillade of sleet. Just audible over the rattle: a blue jay doing its imitation of a red-tailed hawk.
2/7/2018
Steady sleet. A squirrel bores into the frozen earth to retrieve a black walnut, then schleps the battered, lumpy thing into the treetops.
11/7/2017
Mid-morning and the yard is seething with birds—chickadees, sparrows, juncos, nuthatches, titmice—foraging and singing despite the sleet.
3/18/2017
Thick fog, and the road gray with sleet that fell in the night. Three red-bellied woodpeckers are whinnying back and forth in the treetops.
1/14/2017
It’s still. The birds seem restless. Then the snow starts: mixed with sleet at first, then in big clumps, giving the ground a mottled look.