A squirrel walks slowly through the woods, searching its memory, then stops, digs through the fresh snow and comes up with a nut.
snow
Blowing snow plasters my boots, propped up on the railing. The creek is living in the past as usual, roaring with last night’s heavy rains.
Where a crevasse leads to an underground stream, a small hole has opened in the snowy yard, a dark ear throbbing with its own pulse.
Blue shadows on the snow, and the sun so bright, sparkles gleam like lighthouse beacons even from within some of the thinner shadows.
This morning’s stillness is made of fresh snow, a distant jet, the quiet squeaks of a downy woodpecker and a dove’s whistling wings.
New snow on every twig: a strange fur, this fine, dry stuff that forms so far below freezing. A vole rustles in the leaves beside the porch.
A slow snow. I love that brief period before the walk is completely buried: the random mottling, the impression of a great, anonymous crowd.
After a cold night, the temperature climbs to 40 by mid-morning and the snow loses its hard sparkle, flattens into a shining white pelt.
A line of tracks from under the porch to the creek and back look like the prints a very small man walking on his hands would make: raccoon.
Three inches of fresh snow, unmarred by a single human track. A scrabbling of claws: five squirrels on the trunk of a dead maple.
With the snowpack in retreat, those seedheads I’d gotten so used to seeing have disappeared back into the underlying chaos of dead weeds.
After a warm night, the bare spots are bigger than the patches of white, except in the woods and in the sky. The creek sings higher notes.
Thick fog and a slow dripping of meltwater onto the porch roof. Some of the animal tracks in the yard have melted through—dark portholes.
Traffic noise from over the hill is deafening—the icy snowpack has become a sounding board. In the tulip tree, four slow, amorous squirrels.