Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
A half inch of windblown powder atop yesterday’s couple inches of wet snow. A white-throated sparrow foraging on the lee side of the springhouse pauses to sing.
An inch or two of wet snow sticks to everything, and it’s still coming down, bringing the kind of wonderland I’d wondered whether we’d see at all this winter. A song sparrow sings his spring song.
Which will last longest: the snow banks piled up by the plow or by the wind? It’s almost below freezing again, with shifting patches of light and dark overhead like a deck of cards being shuffled.
Fog lingering well into mid-morning. On the northwest-facing hillside, snow cover is down to about 50 percent: lacework, says my internal idealist. In tatters, the realist replies.
Swarms of large, amalgamated snowflakes fly past the porch well into mid-morning. When the wind drops for a few seconds, they hover nearly motionless, as if awaiting orders.
Thaw. The snowpack has shrunk by about half, and the snowplowed banks that flank the road have opened their dark dirt hearts. The gray sky turns faintly pink as the wind picks up.
Bright and bitter cold, with a wind obsessively rearranging the snow. A ragged oak leaf comes tumbling out of the woods and skitters up the road, following a stripe of sunlight.
A heavy, gray sky that from time to time emits a shimmer of fine precipitation. Woodpeckers’ rhythms turn irregular as they move from their drumming trees to their dining trees. A bit of highway noise for the first time in a week.
A slow snowfall that never quite quits as I sit enjoying the balmy temperature—just seven degrees below freezing!—and the continuing, slow-motion courtship of the squirrels.
Three or four slow-moving squirrels crowd onto the big tulip tree. But there’s a loner 50 feet away, diving repeatedly into the snow as if unable to locate a buried nut. After a while, he retreats into the canopy to eat black birch seeds.
Quiet except for the wingbeats of a raven. When the icy breeze dies, my breath begins to freeze to my glasses. Sun-sparkles in the snow fall victim to a bank of clouds.
The deep cold continues, with a fresh dusting of snow on the porch and high, thin clouds that sap the sun of its blaze. A bitter wind slips in under my coat.
In deep cold and silence, entranced by sun-sparkle and the slow shadow-play of trees in the yard, I nearly turn into the Simpsons meme, Old Man Yells at Clouds.