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.
wind
An hour past sunrise, the clouds are darker closer to the horizon. Three crows are having an argument in the treetops that ends with one of them angrily leaving the premises. The hiss of wind.
A fresh inch and a half of dry snow, and the bitter wind that bore it now ushering a flotilla of orange clouds across a sky of startling blue. From my mother’s house, the murmur of voices on the radio like a distant surf, accompanied not by the cries of gulls but the chatter of house finches.
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.
Bare trees dance wildly in the wind, branches clacking like castanets. Snowmelt dripping from the roof flies back up toward the fast-moving clouds.
A heavily overcast Christmas morning. With the hum of industry stilled, I can hear the wind in the pines a hundred yards off—a sleeper’s sudden, long sigh.
Dawn. A raven emerges from a tall pine near the powerline, croaking and circling until his mate joins him. How is the wind this morning? Evidently just right.
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.
A bitter cold wind at dawn. A raven croaking as high as a crow flies over, setting off a chickadee. Then nothing again but the sound of wind.
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.
Wind and clouds and the clattering of treetops rocking out of sync. Two squirrels hunting the last unfallen acorns keep climbing into the top branches of a big red oak, hanging by their hind legs to peel their prizes.
Cold and mostly clear. An occasional sound of trains or traffic rises above the shush of wind. A single red cloud scuds overhead and disappears off east.
Cold and gray, with the wind hissing through the last few oak leaves still on the trees. The male Carolina wren sleeps in past his mate, her ‘response’ preceding his call by nearly five minutes.