Bitter cold with a wind. The happy sounds of juncos coming down to drink from the spring’s thin trickle. Overhead, a faint wash of pink.
sunrise
Cold with a patchwork sky in which some pink appears and fades. The red squirrel scolds from its hole high in a locust as a gray squirrel leaps from birch to birch.
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.
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.
A gray sunrise, with the kind of tiny, windblown raindrops that started life as snow. Fire sirens wail in the valley, and I picture a house sprouting wings of flame.
Red at dawn and again at sunrise, in case old sailors harbor any doubts about the forecast. A cold breeze gets up my nose, and the whole hollow echoes with the sneeze.
Deep cold, with hoarfrost silvering every twig and dead weed. The sun clears the ridge and spreads glitter among the icicles. A white-breasted nuthatch begins to kvetch.
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.
Up with the sun, facing each other across 93 million miles of silence. It’s cold. I close my eyes for the brief afterimage: stark branches against a blood-red sky.
Bitter cold. A few small clouds turn brick-red. When the wind drops, there’s a staccato burst of pileated woodpecker alarm, answered only by a nuthatch.
A dark and rainy dawn. Will anything mark the hidden sunrise? Yes: three crows fly right over the house, yelling. The rain continues.
The first sunrise above freezing in weeks. The sun climbs into the palest shade of blue as treetops sway and gyrate in the wind. A chickadee sings his springiest tune.
Wind and snow—a fresh two inches on everything. Sun-colored holes open in the gray clouds and swiftly close again. The cold creeps in through my coat.
After an orange sunrise, in the ordinary light of an overcast morning, the mechanical tapping of a downy woodpecker, the slow wingbeats of a raven.