Sun finds the spokes of miniature daffodils opening beside the disease-ravaged lilac. I pull my hat-brim down to watch all the early insects already plying the cold spring air.
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.
Cold and still. Sunlit stripes brighten between the trees as the songbird chorus dwindles to one energetic song sparrow in a spicebush next to the springhouse.
Cold and overcast after a night of rain. The creek is a full chorus. A crow alights in the big tulip tree, breaks off a twig and carries it away.
The cool start to a day with a forecast for heat. Red-bellied woodpeckers are winnying in the yard trees. Two or three daffodil buds are swelling into yellow.
Cool and partly sunny. A Cooper’s hawk flies from tree to tree at the woods’ edge, emitting its odd call, then heads off down-hollow, only to slip back five minutes later in silence.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.
A couple inches of snow plastered to the porch and the eastern sides of trees. I can just make out a cardinal’s cheer, cheer above the bitter wind.
Damp, overcast and cool. The pussy willow I planted two years ago is in its glory, gray catkins cottony with droplets of water. A small cloud forms in the meadow behind the barn and drifts up toward the ridge.
Mackerel sky like a wrinkled brow. The spring is still singing about the last rain. The phoebe who called at sunrise flicks his tail.
Brick-red clouds barely move as a relentless wind rummages through the trees and shrubs on the ridgeside. A thin slice of moon gets lost among tossing limbs.
A fur of hoarfrost that lingers long after the daily woodpecker drum circle has broken up. A raven croaks in answer to a crow, under a hospital-white sky.
Cold and gray at mid-morning. I look up from my book to spot a brown creeper inching up a tree trunk at the woods’ edge. An especially mournful train horn echoes through the hollow.