Sunny and warm with high winds, as if March’s proverbial lion and lamb were the same. Trees sway drunkenly. Their dead shed leaves rise up.
wind
An hour before sunrise, the bitter wind says winter but the creek says spring. The moon’s gone flat, but is still as bright as a false dawn.
A few hours into March and the wind starts to gust. On south-facing slopes, scattered splotches of bare ground like an incipient rash.
This is winter as I remember it from my childhood: more than a foot of drifting snow at 20°F. The Carolina wren is singing under the house.
The snowstorm over, it’s quiet, except for the wind. A cardinal shelters in a barberry bush, as red as the berries had been.
The one-time slush pile in the yard looks hard as a wind-dried bone. The tall pines sigh in their sleep. I begin to lose feeling in my toes.
A bitter wind salted with snow. I spot an orange ornament on a lilac branch: a jelly ear fungus, too pretty to eat, sporting a tiny icicle.
Light clouds in the east, dark clouds in the west, and everywhere the hush of the wind. A hawk goes by too fast for the squirrels to notice.
An east wind raises fallen leaves and makes them fly. The most aerodynamic ones circle slowly, as if searching for the best resting place.
A cold front roared in overnight. Now the wind has dropped and the clouds are clearing out. Tall goldenrod stalks shake their gray heads.
In the lily-of-the-valley bed decimated by drought, five blood-colored beads. The wind shuffles the leaves on the porch like playing cards.
The trees are restless with rumors of distant storms. From somewhere nearby, the urgent chirps of nestlings whose parent has just returned.
Sun one minute, rain the next. The plastic flamingo bobbing in the wind keeps her eye on the weeds: cleavers, soapwort, cypress spurge.
Bright sun’s illusion of warmth, dispelled each time the wind blows. The only white in the sky is a tall Amelanchier’s cloud of blossoms.