The sun guttering below a lid of utility-gray cloud illuminates a small flotilla of snowflakes. It’s quiet apart from one, highly excited wren.
snowflakes
3/14/2023
The porch is plastered with fresh snow; more flakes fly past without stopping. A Carolina wren holds forth from the heart of a barberry.
3/7/2023
It’s snowing, fine flakes turning fat and slow—but so many of them, it’s mesmerizing to watch. After a while I look down: I too have been buried.
2/18/2023
Sun blazing through the trees illuminates lost snowflakes, miles from the nearest cloud. A chipmunk with hibernation insomnia races up the driveway.
2/3/2023
-12C with a wind. Which one of those small pink clouds is responsible for these snowflakes? My oil furnace trembles under the house like a wounded animal.
2/1/2023
I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this: bitter cold with the ground mostly bare. Chickadees are having a fracas. Snow drifts down from a clearing sky.
1/26/2023
Gray sky raked by swaying treetops, the wind made visible by squadrons of snowflakes flying this way and that. The sound of rodent teeth.
1/6/2023
A few flakes of snow. Valley sounds eddy on the wind. The sun makes an appearance among the ridgetop trees.
12/11/2022
Slow snowfall in a silence punctuated only by birds. I’m tired enough that watching it feels almost like sleep.
12/1/2022
Treetops rock and sway in the wind—a restive mountainside. A few snowflakes fly this way and that.
4/19/2022
Gauzy curtains of snow falling from the treetops—six inches’ worth—even as more snowflakes start coming down. The wind’s work is never done.
4/17/2022
Looking through a series of thin screens: swirling snowflakes, greening lilac, yellow forsythia, bare trees, holey clouds.
4/10/2022
Snowflakes dance wildly but all the daffodils can do is nod and sway. O sweet Canada, sings the sparrow.
3/27/2022
Winter’s back, with snow on the ground and more coming down. Juncos twitter happily. An ambulance goes wailing through the gap.