Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
Swarms of large, amalgamated snowflakes fly past the porch well into mid-morning. When the wind drops for a few seconds, they hover nearly motionless, as if awaiting orders.
While my neighbor takes a tractor to what Winter Storm Fern left behind, some of the more desultory snowflakes floating down now are close to half an inch across—testament to how long they’ve spent in the clouds, growing arms that look like nothing so much as fronds of fern.
Curtains of snow are falling and falling without a sound, except for the occasional outbreak of squabbling among the clearly delighted snow birds. The growing collection of snowflakes in my lap seems to include far more needles than stars.
Unable to read due to flying snow, I start a collection of asterisks in my lap. When the wind dies, I can hear my mother yelling at the squirrels.
A screech owl’s shivery call. It’s too dark at first to see the shimmer of snow in the air, but as sunrise approaches one can begin to distinguish white streaks, like a head of hair just beginning to go gray.
I have to sweep three inches of snow off the porch before I can sit down, and when I do, flakes of great size land on my lap—little throwing stars a quarter-inch across. When the wind drops, I can hear the Carolina wren.
The ground is white again, not with snow but an inch of sleet that has turned to slush. Snowflakes swirl through the air. The sun peeks out.
Cloudy, windy, and bitter cold, but a house finch caroling by the springhouse sounds genuinely joyful — a soundtrack for the scattered snowflakes flying this way and that.
Sunday-morning silence deepened by fresh snow, with flakes still flurrying about. A band of orange appears in the clouds. The furnace under the house rumbles to life.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Almost all this morning’s voices belong to the wind, except for the nasal chirps of a white-breasted nuthatch somewhere. Snow flies back and forth, never seeming to land.
Heavy gray skies and a bitter wind drop snowflakes in my lap—little six-spoked wheels. A red squirrel at the edge of the porch looks annoyed to find me in its seat.