The one-time slush pile in the yard looks hard as a wind-dried bone. The tall pines sigh in their sleep. I begin to lose feeling in my toes.
snow
Half an hour before sunrise, the first inquisitive chirps: mockingbird. A snow-free caesura in the road where the spring flows under it.
The first stripe of sunlight to make it through the woods follows the 200-year-old colliers’ trail. In thin snow, the cuneiform of sparrows.
A few minutes till sunrise; the wren sounds impatient. But the clouds are heavy—overflowing, in fact. It’s light enough now to see the flakes.
Rising late, I catch the last of some new-snow magic dripping from the eaves. Friends arrive bearing sauerkraut.
Clear and still. The tree’s long shadows stripe the white hillside like a zebra. Below the porch, a cat’s footprints.
Yesterday evening’s new-snow magic has completely dissipated, replaced by the familiar bleakness and a drip drip drip on the porch roof.
A pause in the rain. My snow-plowed mound has turned to slush, which makes an interesting feature for a writer’s front yard: a literal slush pile.
White sky and white ground meet in a blur of fog. Above the drumming of rain on the roof, a white-throated sparrow’s minor-key song.
After a night of light rain, the snowpack has shrunk, revealing a microtopography of logs, pits and mounds—bones under the skin of an elder.
It’s snowing. A squirrel carrying a walnut leaps from limb to limb, trailed by a cascade of powder, and disappears into a hollow oak.
Overcast and cold. Juncos hop down the snowy streambanks for a drink. A female cardinal flies past—the extra red in her open wings.
Cold and still at sunrise. With more than a foot of new-fallen snow, the woods’ edge is an asemic text already being edited by squirrels.
The slow, steady accumulation of dry snow. A raven flies low over the trees with something in its beak. A squirrel’s short-lived footprints.