The solstice dawns cold and overcast, with a small lens of clear sky on the eastern horizon. A thin, wavering song from the meadow: the first white-throated sparrow has woken […] | Continue reading
Clear as a bell and cold as a well, notwithstanding which the brown mountain is beginning to show through its thin blanket of snow. | Continue reading
Well below freezing, with a half-inch of snow on the ground and a wind that keeps turning the pages of my book. The sun appears for a second or two through a gray eyelid of cloud. | Continue reading
Wind seasoned with drizzle in the pre-dawn darkness. Between gusts, the distant whine of tires. A tree limb cracks, but no crash. | Continue reading
Under a gray lid of cloud, nothing stirs. The sun must’ve risen at some point. The air smells of rain. There’s a soft gurgling from the spring. | Continue reading
Cold and very quiet; I’m startled by a rumble from my own gut. The western ridge turns blood-red. | Continue reading
One degree above freezing as the tall pines fill with sun. Two crows emerge from the woods, yelling about some old deer guts that must be just thawed enough for breakfast. | Continue reading
Waiting for the sun at -8C. It’s clear and quiet, except for a squirrel rummaging through frosted leaves, climbing up to a low limb and beginning to gnaw. | Continue reading
Just enough clear sky in the run-up to dawn to catch a few meteors, two of them nearly simultaneous. The absolute silence in which they appear, in contrast to the whine of early traffic on the inte… | Continue reading
Waiting for dawn, I scan the holes in the clouds for meteors. The north side of the springhouse roof still wears a small blanket of snow—more like a thin sheet. Any small beast sleeping in the spri… | Continue reading
The western ridge is white with snow and more flakes spin down from thinning clouds, bellies turning orange against the blue. A crow kites overhead without flapping a wing. | Continue reading
Steady rain—a gloomy sunrise. The big dead maple next to the road has the palest bark, its faces gone blank as masks. | Continue reading
Red at dawn, and red again at sunrise for the last day of regular firearms deer season. Finally, at fifteen minutes past sunrise, a rifle booms. Then silence again. | Continue reading
The moon’s bright bowl full of darkness rises through the trees at dawn and vanishes into clouds. Two great-horned owls on the valley side of the mountain carry on duetting. | Continue reading
A dusting of snow—not even enough to bury the moss. Three gray squirrels in a high-speed chase circle the bole of an oak, claws on bark like castanets. | Continue reading
Some breaks in the clouds around sunrise. The wail of a fire engine on the wind. Snowflakes drift down. | Continue reading
A gloomy dawn lightened by brief scatterings of sleet. The muffled notes of a Carolina wren issue from a hole in the road bank. | Continue reading
A mottled gray sky all the way to the horizon, not brightening even for the sunrise, let alone for the crows with their many complaints or the red-bellied woodpecker jeering from the top of a black… | Continue reading
Steady rain. An hour past sunrise the sky brightens a little, and the trees in their green sleeves of lichen begin to glow. | Continue reading
Fog hides the sunrise, apart from a small opening on the ridgetop that fills with golden light. Then the gray curtain comes down again. | Continue reading
It’s just two degrees above freezing, but after days of cold, I feel overdressed. Juncos twitter softly by the springhouse. Raindrops begin tapping on the porch roof. | Continue reading
An aging contrail stretches toward a sun half-hidden by cloud—fuzzy point at the end of an exclamation mark. Three crows take their argument elsewhere. The furnace under the house shivers to life.… | Continue reading
Bitter cold—and the silence that comes with it. I can hear a squirrel’s claws on bark halfway up the ridge. A raven croaks twice. | Continue reading
A scurf of snow on the ground. A few fat clouds, barely moving, turn orange. A lone crow in the treetops coos like a dove. | Continue reading
Gray and windy. The cedar tree moans against the house. A tulip poplar seed capsule comes spinning in and lands on my shoulder. | Continue reading
Another still, cold sunrise. I watch Venus creeping through the crown of a black locust, dwindling to a point that finally vanishes behind a flotilla of small clouds. | Continue reading
Cold and still for the opening day of rifle season. Distant booms set the crows off. The sun is a bright smudge in a sky more white than blue. | Continue reading
Overcast but bright. I watch small flocks of birds move through the tops of the birches: juncos, kinglets, goldfinches, each skeletal crown studded with winged jewels. | Continue reading
Blue-gray layered with yellow-orange a half hour past sunrise. The creek is still singing about Tuesday’s rain, and the one oak at the woods’ edge that always holds onto its dead leaves hisses in t… | Continue reading
Wet and overcast at sunrise. The forest floor with its carpet of leaves almost glows for a minute or two before subsiding into ordinary brown. | Continue reading
Dawn. A rustle in the leaves as bits of ice and half-frozen raindrops begin falling from the sky. From the lilac, the ticking of a wren. | Continue reading
Crystal-clear and very still at dawn. A last meteor disappears into the spreading spill of light on the eastern horizon. | Continue reading
Waiting for the sun as the western ridge turns from pink to orange to yellow. The plastic flamingo in my garden is furred with frost. | Continue reading
A few degrees above freezing. In the half dark I can just make out a spider descending from the rafters into my lap. Where is she off to, I wonder, so late in the year? | Continue reading
Venus like a searchlight through the bare trees. A great-horned owl calls on the far side of the ridge, but gets no response. He tries again. Silence. | Continue reading
Cold and still at sunrise. The western ridge turns from barn-red to gold, like an autumn in reverse. | Continue reading
Sunrise hidden by a layer of cloud. A white-footed mouse explores the corrugated roof over my oil tanks, its likely sickness shown by its lack of fear. | Continue reading
22F/-5C at sunrise. Every twig and leaf is lightly frosted. I watch my clouds of breath drift into the yard. | Continue reading
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap. | Continue reading
A few patches of frost in the yard as the sun clears the ridgetop. Juncos move through the rambling old lilac, its last few leaves faded nearly to yellow. | Continue reading
Overcast and quiet an hour before sunrise. Hunters’ headlamps move back and forth on the dark hillside like lost stars. | Continue reading
it starts raining just as I come out on the porch, completing the November trinity: cold, gray, and wet. Goldfinch chatter. The keening of truck tires on the interstate. | Continue reading
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns. | Continue reading
Breezy and warm. With each gust of wind, a flotilla of leaves sets sail from the big tulip tree, as the sun ascends a ladder of clouds. | Continue reading
Sunrise glowing orange between the half-naked ridgetop oaks. The yard fills with small birds: sparrows, kinglets, the inevitable wren. | Continue reading
Overcast sunrise for the return to standard time. The restless footsteps of a buck below the house, carrying his rack of bare branches into the woods. | Continue reading
Thin clouds turn livid for the sunrise. A chickadee twitters. Two minutes later, we’re back to gloom. | Continue reading
On a cloudless, quiet mid-morning after a heavy frost, the ground remains white only in the shadows. A single orange leaf falls from the tall tulip poplar, spiraling slowly down into the dead golde… | Continue reading