Fine snow. Cleaning the dust off my glasses, everything blurs together: white sky, white ground, the noise of trains and sparrows.
train
December 19, 2020
Cloudy and cold. A cardinal perched in the lilac sings softly, barely opening his beak. The sound of a freight train laboring up the valley.
October 20, 2020
Under a low cloud ceiling, the thunder of trains and traffic from the valley. The black cat’s deadly silence trips a gray-squirrel alarm.
March 23, 2019
Deep blue sky. The distant rumble of a freight train heading west. The one remaining snowbank in the yard looks permanent as marble.
February 2, 2019
The sound of two trains approaching a crossing at the same time—their unplanned duet. I study the tracks in the yard, looking for groundhog.
January 23, 2019
A high-pitched train horn. The yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker. Almost imperceptibly, rain begins to tap on the snowpack’s icy lid.
December 6, 2018
Half a degree above freezing, but it’s enough to melt last night’s snow everywhere the weak sunlight reaches. Quiet but for the trains.
October 20, 2018
Now that I can see the quaking aspens, through bare walnut branches, I can hear them too: their constant whisper. Gauzy rain. A train horn.
March 28, 2018
Fog settles in, full of the labor of freight trains. Snow mounded up by the plow rots in the otherwise bare yard like a white whale carcass.
March 13, 2018
Had I not risen early I would’ve missed the sun, the rooster, two doves’ calls blending into something like the distant locomotive’s chord.
January 24, 2018
Winter’s back. You can see it in the dash of snow and thick crust of clouds, hear it in the train’s horn and the querulous cries of crows.
December 24, 2017
Sun through cloud—enough to make the leaf duff shine in the woods. A chipmunk rustles. The distant squeal of a misaligned wheel on a train.
October 16, 2017
The train’s horn is full of Monday. Migrating towhees compare notes at the edge of the woods. A blue wound closing in the clouds.
October 5, 2017
A squadron of tulip poplar keys spinning down into the stiltgrass. From over the ridge, a locomotive’s hoarse chord.