Snow flurries at dawn, the ground more light than dark. A screech owl trills softly up on the ridge as the phone warms my pocket, installing an update.
snow
Rain zebra-striped with snow; the woods more wet than white. A sodden squirrel trots down the road with a black walnut between her teeth.
Snowmelt dripping from the eaves. When the sun peeks through the clouds, it becomes a bead curtain. The wren is singing.
Out before dawn with the first snow of the year landing cold kisses on my face. The ground glows pale in the darkness. When I get up to take a walk an hour later, my lap and coat shed their new layer of fur.
Four hours before the equinox, the ground is white, with more snow swirling down. The miniature daffodils dangle from their stalks like deflated balloons.
The ground is white again, and the trees sway like drunks as small orange clouds scud past. I sample the freezing air through a sunburnt nose.
The woods are far more brown than white after yesterday’s warmth. I glance up from my book to a splash of yellow in the clouds, lapsing into another day’s gray.
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.
In the rising sun’s slow shadow-play projected onto the snow, sleeping trees drift on a sea of glitter. A visitation of wings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Day slips in among torrents of rain. The woods are mangy with scattered patches of old snow. The gurgle of a wren.