Just past sunrise, a clearing wind. I look up from the Eastern Europe of my book to flame-bellied clouds, the forest all astir.
wind
Five degrees below freezing. The lilac leaves are already big enough to show their backs to the wind. Four white narcissuses bob and sway.
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.
Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.
A flash mob of snowflakes rushing this way and that. Over the sound of water, the wind: all hiss, no hush.
Windy and cold after last night’s freakish warmth. Up in the woods, a large coyote trots across the threadbare snowpack. The wail of a train.
The sun rose before I did, turning every snowbound tree into a gnomon. The tall pines are soughing, though my breath rises straight up.
Windy and overcast at moonset, at dawn. Just when I’m thinking it’s unremittingly bleak, the gray sky acquires the faintest hint of pink.
Patches of blue sky; occasional snowflakes. What appears to be a butterfly fluttering through the treetops must be a dead leaf.
After last night’s wind, the sky is clear, the forest has finally lost almost all its leaves, and there are several new creaks and groans.
Snow on the ground and in the air. When the wind eddies around to the east, a great flock of shriveled leaves lifts off from the lilac.
Cold and gray. Goldenrod seed heads like white-haired old men nodding and whispering far-fetched conspiracy theories about a coming winter.
Clouds scudding against clouds, and here and there faint suggestions of blue: a clearing wind, complete with the obligatory exultant raven.
Dawn comes with a light breeze rummaging through the oaks, a freight train laboring up the valley, the tutting of robins.