Cold rain; the snowpack is in tatters now. At the top of a locust snag, a gray squirrel’s tail waves and twitches like a mad flag.
snow
Small clouds rise from the decaying snowpack and drift off through the trees. In the yard, a vole’s tunnel system is beginning to emerge.
The snow has gone slushy, turning the hollow from a soundproof room into an echo chamber. Over the traffic noise, a junco’s cadenza.
Patches of bare yard dug up by deer. Patches of blue sky which the sun now and then pops through. The drip drip of meltwater from the roof.
Snow fine as fingerprint powder; it’s almost zero. Two cardinals and a jay in the crabapple tree wait their turn to drink from the spring.
Take one polar vortex. Add westerly winds, seasoned lightly with snow. Stir in some birds and trees. Heat with a star 93 million miles away.
Another snowfall. The small hole in the yard that leads to an underground stream remains open, like a breathing hole for seals in sea ice.
Trees at the woods’ edge with their branches out to catch all the light they can—or in this case, snow. A pileated woodpecker’s flaming cap.
From under the house, rabbit tracks encircling a half-eaten raspberry cane, raccoon tracks going straight to the stream—muddy on the return.
The wind raises snow from the ground like a necromancer. Basking in the sun’s feeble heat, I watch the six-spoked wheels settle on my coat.
Yesterday it was below freezing and rained; now it’s above freezing and snow is coming down: dilettantish at first, then in a mad dance.
A high-pitched train horn. The yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker. Almost imperceptibly, rain begins to tap on the snowpack’s icy lid.
Between storms, the sound of traffic. Between the white ground and the white sky, fog, and the haute couture of snow coating every tree.
A dusting of fresh graupel, and more flying past: like large grains of salt, or snowflakes which, tragically, are in no way unique.