Overcast at sunrise, but the cloud lid lifts enough for the sun to glimmer through when it crests the ridge. Saturday’s snow is looking threadbare—a disintegrating shroud over the not-yet dead.
snow
February 20, 2024
In the rising sun’s slow shadow-play projected onto the snow, sleeping trees drift on a sea of glitter. A visitation of wings.
February 17, 2024
Patches of blue sky at sunrise. A red-tailed hawk sits in a high oak limb, pale breast half-camouflaged against the snow that fell in the night.
February 13, 2024
A filigreed fretwork of wet snow clinging to everything. From the valley, the wail of sirens. The cloud cover thins to a kind of brightness.
February 10, 2024
Unseasonably warm and very quiet. Sunrise appears through a rift in the clouds: gold in the east, black in the west. The last five piles of icy snow look as out of place as alien spacecrafts.
February 1, 2024
Just past sunrise the sky almost clears, then clouds over again. The thermometer’s black arrow points straight at 32. The mound of plowed slow at the edge of the yard looks lost and abandoned, like Lot’s wife after she glanced back.
January 28, 2024
Day slips in among torrents of rain. The woods are mangy with scattered patches of old snow. The gurgle of a wren.
January 26, 2024
Fog on snow. The hidden full moon’s false dawn obscures the real one. Distant traffic is drowned out by the sound of rushing water.
January 25, 2024
Fog blurs the difference between the white below and above, the trees reduced to gray wraiths as a Carolina wren sings for the break of day.
January 24, 2024
Damp and cold. Snowmelt drips from the roof. A blue jay makes a half-hearted hawk-scream and fall silent.
January 23, 2024
As below, so above, the trees marooned in a flat whiteness no less absolute than that of a blank page, albeit one navigated by squirrels.
January 19, 2024
First light. White lines crisscross the dark edge of the woods: snow on trees. I stick my hand out to feel it falling, flakes as fine as dust melting into my palm.
January 16, 2024
Snow falling at dawn—fine flakes at first, then larger and faster as the darkness subsides, as if they’re emissaries for the day. A chickadee sings his wistful, two-note song.
January 14, 2024
Snow at first light—a silent mob of moving shadows, pecks on my cheek—then as dawn approaches, the slow differentiation of black and swirling white.