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.
snow
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.
A fresh inch of snow, fallen in the small hours, gives the wind new wings. A patch of sky turns salmon a bit to the south of where the sun usually comes up. A squirrel runs along the snow-free underside of a limb.
The merest shimmer of snow against the dark trees. The shriek of misaligned wheels on a lumbering freight train. One of the neighbor’s hens yelling her head off.
At sunrise by the clock, the ground is still lighter than the sky. The wren who called once at dawn has clammed up. Snowflakes seem to have forgotten all about falling, and fly in every direction except down.
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.
Windy and cold, with snow clumped in every dip and divot. An icy creaking from the trees. The western ridge glows and fades as the sun climbs into the clouds.
Clouds like a thick, gray quilt. The creek has sunk to a whisper, and the threadbare snowpack crackles like wax paper under the squirrels’ feet.
A fresh half-inch of snow turns the woods’ edge into calligraphy. Then an inversion layer brings traffic noise, a shimmer of freezing drizzle, the tut-tutting of a Carolina wren.
Fine snow slowing to a stop by sunrise and resuming 45 minutes later. It’s quiet enough to hear what the creek is saying both before and after it travels under my yard.
Overcast, but with more brightness than gloom. On the forest floor, a barely-there lacework of snow. Somewhere in between, a goldfinch’s warble.
A drumbeat of meltwater dripping onto the porch roof as the sky clears, just in time for the sun to top the ridge. My bootprints from last night’s walk have grown huge and dark.