7:00 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 14 degrees, wind NW 0 mph. Sky: the nearly unlidded eye of dawn. A festival in pastel, pinks and peach in the south and east, yellow in the west. Overhead, the few blue-gray clouds fringed in color. Mostly rose and mauve. As I walk, the color drains, the clouds congeal, eventually, horizon to horizon, a somber lid. Then, snow . . . an imposition in white. Permanent streams: upper, solar-corroded mink tracks reduced to dimples, direction ambiguous; lower, gift wrapped in ice and snow, an inarticulate flow. Wetlands: lustrous and birdless. Pond: a clone of yesterday—tracks of children skating, deer walking, me slipping.
To pass time in the land of ditto, as an anodyne against boredom, I play with my digital thermometer, the one I used on basking rattlesnakes, and take a roster of external temperatures, a doctor in down. Since chickadees won't sit still long enough for a house call, I have to examine trees: black cherry 13.8 degrees; white pine 17 degrees; barkless pine 14.8 degrees; white ash 16.8 degrees; sugar maple 15.8 degrees. I expand my informal survey: the snow 14.3 degrees; fat dog 34 degrees; thin dog 41 degrees.
Data collection is interrupted by a nuthatch—a white-breasted outburst. I'm the victim of the lifelong affliction of distraction, which is why I face the wall when I write. A moment later, the thermometer pocketed, solitary chickadee whistles slowly and quietly, as though practicing, an audition of sorts, an early and tentative claim to the gnarled pine between the riding ring and road. No one answers. So, I whistle, much too loudly, to be taken seriously by anything other than my dogs. Abruptly, the chickadee stops singing, shifts to dee, dee, dee. Dogs, eyes wide, ears limp, wait with the patience of Job for something more than my smile. As I, grinning at a little gray bird, lean into the scaffolding of my life.
"To pass the time in the land of ditto"--THAT line is going into my quotation folder!! Sounds like a good title for a book or an article or a song. And your digital thermometer measurements bring a smile--"doctor in down". I think of Mary Oliver's words: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Thanks for sharing your awareness!
nearly every day now "sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday" or today "two minutes" - now there is some irrefutable, welcome news - hard data, a trend. More sunlight fuels the tentative bird songs... light ignites late winter smiling.