A faint shimmer of precipitation from a leaden sky. The vole in the yard is gathering more bedding. A white-throated sparrow sings once and falls silent.
snow
Rain falling on snow: a soft sound that slowly grows harder, like a fantasy evolving into a belief. The dark tree limbs still look dapper in their new white sleeves.
The slow fall of small snowflakes never quite stops. A squirrel with a half a tail bounds past, carrying his freshy disinterred breakfast: a black lump of frozen walnut.
The ground is white with sleet and graupel, and there’s a shimmer of rain from a sky like gray wool. A pileated woodpecker bursts out of the woods, cackling maniacally.
A gray sunrise, signalled only by the yelling of crows. After yesterday’s warmth, the ground is more brown than white. The wind picks up, clattering through the treetops.
A fresh half-inch of snow, and the ground’s as white as the sky again. From over the ridge, the roar of a Monday morning. A blue jay jeers.
Fog thickens as the rain eases off. The sodden snowpack shrinks, fitting the ground more closely, clinging to each mound and divot.
In the half-dark of dawn, the white noise of wind is made literal by flocks of snowflakes swirling this way and that. Rabbit tracks go under the house and do not reemerge.
A sunrise in layers of orange and gray makes the absence of color below in the snow seem absolutely surreal. Three crows fly over the house. The furnace rumbles awake.
Snow at sunrise: widely-spaced flakes falling from a half-clear sky for more than half an hour. After a while, I feel as if I’m witnessing some sort of procession, slow and silent.
Snow starts in the gray dawn of a quiet Sunday, small flakes falling thickly, turning the road white again. Distant sirens. A squirrel crouches on a limb with its tail over its head.
Every morning should start this way, with enough snow fallen in the night to erase yesterday’s tracks: the proverbial clean slate. The sound of my neighbor’s plow scraping down to the ice.
A fresh scurf of snow on the porch. The trees with their moon-shadows stretching east like dark carpets rolled out for the rumored sun. All the old aches in my body. It’s cold.
Not far below freezing. The sun appears through a keyhole in the clouds. A gray squirrel reaches into the snow and extracts a black walnut.