The first stripe of sunlight to make it through the woods follows the 200-year-old colliers’ trail. In thin snow, the cuneiform of sparrows.
sunrise
Just after sunrise, the side of the ridge where fresh snow is sheltered from the wind turns pink, until the clouds close in with their flaming bellies.
A few minutes till sunrise; the wren sounds impatient. But the clouds are heavy—overflowing, in fact. It’s light enough now to see the flakes.
Out before sunrise, I watch the sky on the weather app switch from black to blue in less than a heartbeat. Then the slow blood-reddening of the ridge.
After a red sunrise, the sky turns dark for St. Lucy’s Day. But who needs candles? My outrage at our broken politics is incandescent.
The western ridge glows orange with sunrise under a lid of clouds. It’s very quiet. I can hear the soft, inquisitive chirps of waking birds.
Sunrise: a glimpse of yellow from beneath the lid of clouds. Goldfinches flutter down to drink from the stream’s thin fissure of open water.
Dawn. A Carolina wren drops like a ninja from its roost in the old hornets’ nest. The sky between the ridgetop trees turns to blood.
The western ridge shines golden against dark clouds for a few minutes before the sun goes in. A gunshot. The gurgling of the stream.
Two tulip poplar leaves vibrate in a private wind: chickadees. The western ridge turns from blood-red to orange to yellow—autumn in reverse.
Brighter color between the trees: sunrise. Gray as their trunks: a doe and her grown fawns. From down hollow, a screech owl’s trill.
Under dark clouds, the field full of goldenrod glows in the rising sun’s light like some Viking hoard in an archaeologist’s trench.
Ten degrees above freezing at sunrise. A squirrel leaps through the soft snow like a salmon swimming upstream. High overhead, a raven calls.
Cold and very still. The sun climbs through the ridgetop trees as slowly and bristly as a porcupine of light.