The sun guttering below a lid of utility-gray cloud illuminates a small flotilla of snowflakes. It’s quiet apart from one, highly excited wren.
snow
3/14/2023
The porch is plastered with fresh snow; more flakes fly past without stopping. A Carolina wren holds forth from the heart of a barberry.
3/13/2023
A fresh inch of wet snow, clinging to every twig—the forest refoliated in white. But already the roof has begun to drip.
3/11/2023
As above, so below—the ground the same white as the cloud ceiling. My thick hat excludes all but the sound of wind and birds and a train horn’s dissonant chord.
3/10/2023
Flurries in lieu of a sunrise; the ground is already white again. A faint, yellow-green wash on the rambling old lilac—buds are beginning to swell.
3/7/2023
It’s snowing, fine flakes turning fat and slow—but so many of them, it’s mesmerizing to watch. After a while I look down: I too have been buried.
3/4/2023
The ground is once again armored in white. Gusts of wind materialize like minor demons, treetops crashing together, dropping dead limbs.
2/28/2023
Rain and fog and the ground white with slush. I try to remember the last time I saw a rabbit.
2/23/2023
Mist rises from yesterday’s half inch of icy snow. A robin briefly joins the dawn chorus. The front-garden chipmunk returns from the woods with bulging cheeks.
1/31/2023
A skim of snow overnight; a front has blown in and the birds are so much quieter. But a cold, gray morning is fine for gray squirrel romance: a pair ascend a young tulip tree together, touching often, and descend the adjacent walnut tree, nose to tail.
1/30/2023
The snowpack is holey again. A sunrise sky is visible through the trees on the ridgetop for just a few minutes until the fog descends.
1/28/2023
Mid morning, and the strong sunlight reveals in every shadow-casting hummock how snugly the ground’s coat of snow has come to fit.
1/27/2023
Snow squall. A squirrel with two pursuers ascends a birch and turns on them, chasing again and again as the snow stops and clouds turn yellow.
1/26/2023
Gray sky raked by swaying treetops, the wind made visible by squadrons of snowflakes flying this way and that. The sound of rodent teeth.