Snowflakes blown off the roof mingle with first-time fallers. A few trees rock back and forth as if trying to rile up the crowd.
wind
Bright sun, bone-chilling wind. The hillside has lost its white blanket, which makes it feel even colder. The clouds are again worlds apart.
Last night’s torrential rain has given way to wind, sunlight shimmering on the flooded stream and the waxy leaves of mountain laurel.
Take one polar vortex. Add westerly winds, seasoned lightly with snow. Stir in some birds and trees. Heat with a star 93 million miles away.
The wind raises snow from the ground like a necromancer. Basking in the sun’s feeble heat, I watch the six-spoked wheels settle on my coat.
Storm past, the temperature is plunging, just as they predicted. The new icicles aren’t even done dripping. They sway in the bitter wind.
A dusting of fresh graupel, and more flying past: like large grains of salt, or snowflakes which, tragically, are in no way unique.
A new addition to the forest’s ensemble of creaks. The drumming of two pileated woodpeckers a quarter mile apart, fast as machine gun fire.
The top of a dying red maple has been blown down across my walk. The wind raises a zombie army of leaves to go staggering over the snow.
Snowflakes streaming past the house like commuters, the sun almost out, the meadow’s white fur from last night’s cold front almost all gone.
Windy and overcast. Bare branches sway and clatter. The scattered chirps of small birds gusting toward the feeders at the other house.
The wind sounds even colder hissing through the leaves that still cling to an oak at the woods’ edge. I pull down my cap against the sun.
The ground is once again white, and there’s a wind. A dry, brown oak leaf dropping from the sky rocks from side to side like a small boat.
Bitter wind, its shifts and cross-currents discernible in wide-spaced flakes. A chickadee’s call: the one for putting rivals in their place.