Freezing rain and sleet have turned the snow as rough as a lizard’s skin. A wren hops through the lilac, poking at the ground with his bill.
sleet
Steady rain. The corners of the yard still glisten dully with the pellet ice that fell in the night.
At mid-morning, before the snow starts its quiet infiltration, before the hard knuckles of sleet, the distant hysteria of a mob of crows.
A rattle of sleet gives way to the hush of snow, then the tapping of freezing rain, then back to snow. A squirrel never stops its scolding.
Sleet rattles on the roof like a fast typist. Two deer in the springhouse meadow: when they stop moving, they vanish into the brown weeds.
Fog at daybreak, and a thin coat of sleet like coarse sand. From up in the woods, the sudden squealing of a squirrel fighting off a suitor.
Sleet rattles on roof and garden, yard and road, weeds and woods, like seasoning from some indiscriminate eater of a bare-bones feast.
The sleet whose ticking woke me at 6:00 has stopped. Five degrees below freezing. I stick out my arm and hear raindrops hitting my sleeve.
Just as I take my seat the sleet starts. Pellets the size of fish eyes lodge in the folds of my coat. The brown ground turns a glassy white.
An hour before dawn, whose footsteps are those on the hard crust of snow, first tiptoeing, then running about? Mice, I think. No: sleet.
Riddle me this: no snow fell here, but the ground is white. The trees with their thin coats of ice creak and clatter in the darkness.