Wandering tracks of sparrows and juncos in the snow below the porch. Beyond that, bare patches pawed open by hungry deer in the night.
snow
Low sun on snow—even the shadows glitter. I’m feeling creaky, like the labored wingbeats of a dove starting up from the water.
Woodpeckers big and small are tapping on trees without disturbing the snow on every branch. Hibernating insects will never hear the knock.
The top of a dying red maple has been blown down across my walk. The wind raises a zombie army of leaves to go staggering over the snow.
Snowflakes streaming past the house like commuters, the sun almost out, the meadow’s white fur from last night’s cold front almost all gone.
One mound of November’s snow has survived into 2019. I’m watching a brown creeper but hearing a nuthatch—and all the voices of the stream.
I’m reading about the haiku poet who helped lead the Rape of Nanjing. Snow melt begins to drip from the top roof: muffled artillery fire.
On the snow-covered log beside the stream, the baby’s-handprint tracks of raccoons. A wren above the water burbling in counterpoint.
The ground is once again white, and there’s a wind. A dry, brown oak leaf dropping from the sky rocks from side to side like a small boat.
Half a degree above freezing, but it’s enough to melt last night’s snow everywhere the weak sunlight reaches. Quiet but for the trains.
Flakes in the air. The weather’s turned cold in time to save the last, shrunken curls of snowbanks, marooned like sea creatures on a beach.
Sky heavy with weather. In the woods, more bare ground than snow. Brightness persists only in scarlet barberries and the fresh green moss.
Cloudy but bright. I notice many of the pits in the old snow, melted down by oak leaves, have acquired new snow and a second, upstairs leaf.
A singing contest between white-throated sparrows. Newly fallen oak leaves skitter back and forth on the snow under the trees.