Cold, gray and windy. The peony sprouts, up early this year, are still at the point of just untwisting their skinny red fists.
wind
The top half of a dead elm behind the house crashes down in the wind. I remember the porcupine in its topmost branch like a crown of thorns.
A cold wind at sunrise. Daffodils nod, while the forsythia shakes its yellow fingers in a vaguely apotropaic gesture. Hard frost on the way.
Snow blows sideways and rises from the ground in snaky spirals. A Carolina wren dances on top of the stone wall like a wind-up toy.
A killdeer’s song drifts down from high overhead, and to the south, the piping of a ragged flock of geese struggling against the high winds.
The wind moves snow back and forth across the ground like a restless sculptor. Trees creak and groan: a regular machinery of discontent.
Walnut tree branches behind the house rock by turns, as if from the passage of some large animal, but it’s only this warm-blooded wind.
Trees rock and sway, infiltrated by snowflakes flying this way and that. From deep in the lilac, the wandering warble of a tree sparrow.
Wind-driven snow; I draw my hood tight. On the wall behind me, the thermometer’s big red arrow inches left like a clock running backward.
Snow blowing sideways. As the wind changes direction, two dead trees fallen onto the living take turns complaining: first eeee, then ahhh.
At first light, some newly toppled tree creaks in the wind. What I’d taken for the dog statue on the far side of the yard swivels its ears.
The wind is busy dismantling its favorite instrument. I can now see clear to the ridgetop through the thinning trees—the sky beyond.
Colored leaves turn backwards in the cold wind—still the same pale green. A pileated woodpecker’s distant chant.
Wind moves in the trees behind the trees, and a small yellow leaf tumbles down from the overcast sky, taking its time to reach the ground.