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.
snow
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.
While my neighbor takes a tractor to what Winter Storm Fern left behind, some of the more desultory snowflakes floating down now are close to half an inch across—testament to how long they’ve spent in the clouds, growing arms that look like nothing so much as fronds of fern.
Curtains of snow are falling and falling without a sound, except for the occasional outbreak of squabbling among the clearly delighted snow birds. The growing collection of snowflakes in my lap seems to include far more needles than stars.
Last night’s snow is still falling as wind sweeps through the forest, shaking the trees down. Meltwater drips from the porch roof. Rhododendron leaves, no longer tightly curled against the cold, shimmer in the sun.
Another dusting of snow. An hour past sunrise, the clouds above the ridge ease open just enough for the sun to glower through for two minutes.
A dusting of snow that will be gone by the afternoon, under a sky hoarding its white. A downy woodpecker’s machine-gun burst of taps.
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.