When the wind dies, I can hear the roaring of the creek. I sit in the dark, composing a limerick in my head.
wind
Gray skies and a bitter wind. Snowflakes keep finding the open book in my lap; I sweep them off with a glove before they can vanish into the ample whitespace surrounding the text.
The winds that buffeted the house all night have mostly retreated to the ridgetop—a distant roar. A few, yellow-bellied clouds add their scattered flakes to the windblown snow drifting atop the ice. I hear my mother on her back porch yelling at the squirrels.
Bright sun belies the bitter wind. A tiny but perfect snowflake lands on the back of my hand, that watchword for familiarity gloved in the skin of a cow.
A dark sky at dawn with one bright gash. As it eases shut, an icy breeze springs up. The stream gurgles softly in its sleep.
Pink lingers in the sky for half an hour past sunrise. Great gusts of wind roar through the forest and my eyes track the motion, automatically searching for the beast I know isn’t there.
A gray sunrise, signalled only by the yelling of crows. After yesterday’s warmth, the ground is more brown than white. The wind picks up, clattering through the treetops.
Temperature falling as the sun rises. The sound of wind from far off. A small scarlet oak that kept some of its leaves shivers a little.
Wind and thaw. Fat clouds sail over with bright orange prows and dark bellies. A dead leaf makes circles in the corner of the porch.
In the half-dark of dawn, the white noise of wind is made literal by flocks of snowflakes swirling this way and that. Rabbit tracks go under the house and do not reemerge.
The deep cold has returned, bringing silence and a bitter wind. The just-past-full moon slips behind a cloud in the west and never returns. From under the house, the sound of gnawing.
A fresh inch of snow, fallen in the small hours, gives the wind new wings. A patch of sky turns salmon a bit to the south of where the sun usually comes up. A squirrel runs along the snow-free underside of a limb.
Trees creak and clatter in the growing light. Somewhere nearby, freezing sap is trapped and the heartwood bursts, loud as a rifle shot.
Gray at sunrise with a bitter wind. Just as I’m thinking that the difference between wonder and bleakness comes down to perspective, small flocks of snowflakes begin to appear. Like magic.