Another day, another snow: fat flakes coming down just thickly enough to be mesmerizing, turning the ground blank again. A gun goes off.
snow
Monday November 29, 2021
A scurf of fresh snow. Crows getting told off by a raven. Bright patches in the sky—which holds the sun?
Sunday November 28, 2021
An inch of wet snow clinging to everything: that clean smell in the half-dark of dawn. When my furnace cycles off, a great silence descends.
Friday November 26, 2021
Snow on the ground and in the air. When the wind eddies around to the east, a great flock of shriveled leaves lifts off from the lilac.
Monday November 15, 2021
Clearing sky after a brief snow squall. The ridgeside, slick with leaves of slowly fading colors, shines like a salamander in the sun.
Sunday November 14, 2021
A blank gray sky, this time of year, is the easiest kind to read: snow, it says, in a slowly accelerating tumble of pure punctuation.
Thursday April 22, 2021
A snow flurry turns into a squall, and all the birds fall silent—even the Cooper’s hawk. The ground is white in minutes: an onion snow.
Wednesday April 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.
Thursday April 01, 2021
Fat snowflakes fall on the daffodils’ down-turned cups, while a towhee chants—according to the time-worn birders’ mnemonic—Drink! Drink!
Wednesday March 24, 2021
Dawn. A phoebe and a cardinal are singing in the rain. At the woods’ edge, the last patch of snow has shrunk to the size of a hubcap.
Tuesday March 23, 2021
The last patch of snow is sinking into the earth. A titmouse flits from branch to branch up a walnut sapling, whistling softly to himself.
Wednesday March 17, 2021
Another gray day. The only snow left is what the plow mounded up, the earliest dating back to before Christmas: literal snows of yesteryear.
Friday March 12, 2021
Snow is gone from the north side of the springhouse roof; the stream has a whole new range of notes. Up by the barn, a phoebe is calling.
Thursday March 11, 2021
On the northwest-facing hillside, the snow has shrunk to patches overnight. A robin sings here and there as if testing the acoustics.