Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
A fresh inch and a half of dry snow, and the bitter wind that bore it now ushering a flotilla of orange clouds across a sky of startling blue. From my mother’s house, the murmur of voices on the radio like a distant surf, accompanied not by the cries of gulls but the chatter of house finches.
I have to sweep three inches of snow off the porch before I can sit down, and when I do, flakes of great size land on my lap—little throwing stars a quarter-inch across. When the wind drops, I can hear the Carolina wren.
Clear and cold. Two red squirrels chase around the bole of the big tulip tree, chittering madly. Threadbare as it is, the snow cover still glitters in all the colors of the rainbow.
A cloudless sunrise. The ground is once again white, after yesterday’s snow squalls, and it’s very still. When the wren stops singing, I can hear a low gurgle from the spring.
Warm, torrential showers overnight have reduced the snow to a few, scattered patches. The clouds thin—a radiant break in the rain.
Patches of blue sky open and close as snowmelt drips from the roof. An oak leaf cartwheels up the icy driveway.
Very cold and still. A fingernail moon slips through the trees’ dark digits. Dawn comes with a shift of radiance from the snow-covered ground to the sky.
Sunday-morning silence deepened by fresh snow, with flakes still flurrying about. A band of orange appears in the clouds. The furnace under the house rumbles to life.
Light snow falling at sunrise—enough to obscure the identity of a line of tracks emerging from under the house. In the patch of dead bracken, one frond sways gently on its stalk.
White ground and a white sky, with only the trees to keep them apart. The squirrels are still avoiding the snowy sides of limbs, except when they need a spot to sit and work on a nut.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Gloomy and still. The faint rattle of something like rain, that soon turns into something like snow and peters out. A distant honking of geese.
An inch of wet snow, glowing like a second sky on every branch and twig. I catch a rare whiff of sewage from the treatment plant three miles away.
A bitter wind has brought the first, thin snowfall. I open my folding seat cushion and find a yellow leaf nestled like a letter in an envelope.