Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

March 3, 2021: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:21 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 10 degrees, wind NE 0 mph. Sky: immaculately clear, rim to rim, yet incomprehensibly spitting snow, tiny, tiny flakes falling from nowhere, a clear case of meteorological wizardry. Permanent streams: lit by the light of the deflating moon, otter followed the lower stream out of the marsh, under the road, and up the eastern wall of the valley. Paired prints, much bigger than those of mink, show webbing. Long, muscular, steerage tail followed feet uphill, cut into snow like dragging a stick. Otter, with little to fear of the night, completed an unhurried, unharried assent. Wetlands: mysterious flurries falling from the blue sky. The serpentine drainage path of the marsh visibly dents the snow, like tail-drag on Gargantua the Otter. From inside the far-shore evergreens, pileated drums, daylight's tempo, loud and even, long pauses for composure—my fingers too numb to run the stopwatch. Cry of a companionless blue jay. Pond: coyote passed by, a line of tracks across the weather-edited surface, an uneven run of bubbled, crusted nubbins—a Lilliputian landscape.  

White-breasted nuthatch singing. A loud crow in an empty sky. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, a trio noisy of red crossbills, cruising at treetop level, fly over the road and pitch into a phalanx of pine. No sooner do I see them . . . and they're gone, vanished into green entanglement—an unending quest for cones. Parliament reconvenes, titmice proclamations: hear, hear, hear. (I'm giving up on peter, peter.) Most chickadees calling, one sings high in hemlock, a thin morsel of sound. Turkey tracks wind across my yard to the neighbor's feeders and back, marking the snow: lines like sutures; braids like Boy Scout knots, loose and ineffective. Feeder traffic: jays, chickadees, titmice, red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches, hairy and downy woodpeckers, doves, turkeys.

Fox yipping on the apron of Robinson Hill, signaling intentions, the ripening of late winter. The urgency of bonding. Never was that easy for me. Standing in a crowded Long Island disco, desolate and bereft of confidence, music spilling from the stage. Pre-Billy Joel. Yodeling from a hillside might have been easier. Graduate school, however, worked.