Cold and quiet at sunrise. I walk to the ridgetop, clutching my thermos mug. Snow lingers in dips and hollows where the sun can’t reach.
snow
It’s snowing: fine flakes wet enough to cling to the smallest twigs and give each bergamot stalk a tall white hat. Juncos twitter hosannas.
The snow has shrunk to a few spots the low sun doesn’t reach. In the herb bed, the only white is a pile of clippings from my last haircut.
Bright sun; the snow on the porch has shrunk to the railings’ shadows. That special word for wind in pines, sough: putting the ow back in sigh.
Raw and wintry, with snow on the ground and an iron wind. I muse on the convergent evolution of “December” and “dismember”.
The first snow—a light dusting on the porch and in the yard. Oak leaves take to the sky. A hawk hurtles past in the ridgetop wind.
A classic onion snow, still falling fast when I come out: big wet clumps of flakes weighing down the daffodils, turning the hillside white.
A fresh dusting of snow slowly vanishes—but if the sun has a tongue, the breeze has a bite. The methodical taptaptap of a downy woodpecker.
The ground is white again, and the shape of the wind sketched out by flying flakes. A tree sparrow sings, homesick perhaps for the tundra.
Eyes shut to the strong sun, I watch the shadow-flicker of meltwater dripping from the eaves, the icicles letting go like vestigial tails.
A half-inch of wet snow blew in so fast, it’s plastered to the sides of trees in lumps. From up on the ridge, the white noise of the wind.
A fresh half-inch of snow: the pleasantly arrhythmic dripping of meltwater on the porch roof. Three Vs of geese go fluting overhead.
Two downy woodpeckers tapping back and forth. The sun almost comes out. Someone is out walking on the crusty snow—the crunch of their boots.
Back from the south to cold air, to old snow sagged and wrinkled. Mingling with traffic noise, the voices of non-migratory geese.