6:58 a.m. 25 degrees, wind NNW 8 mph, a couple of pines need lubricating, one needs Pepto Bismol. Sky: pallid and charmless, folded cushions and gray waves, lacking highlights, lacking warmth, a run of winter clouds straight out of the barren lands. Glimpsing the immediate future. Permanent streams: clear, cold, currents cut through a brittle, frosted-flakes landscape, leaves frozen in place . . . snap, crackle, pop. Dogs hear footfalls I miss. Wetlands: wind out of the north unobstructed, seeps under the eyepieces of my binoculars, eyes water. Blurred vision renders the marsh an impression of beige and green and white. Three crows head into the wind, labored, silent flights. Pond: half froze, grainy ice in the south, open, and wind stirred in the north. Between the two, an undulated border slowly annexes open water. Like scar tissue on the surface of the ice, older undulations mark former open-water boundaries . . . marks the passage of hours. Ice reaches out from the eastern shore and from a sheltered pocket in the north—a conversion of ice spreading in all directions.
Chickadee, less interested in ice-formation than I am, flies by. Lands in the alders. Tilts his head back and calls, unanswered, an oft-repeated broadcast—the unspooling of dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.
A red squirrel runs across the road, pinecone in its mouth. Runs up a pine, settles on an eye-level branch, wedges the cone between a radiation of twigs, then, like the chickadee, leans back and calls, open mouth, lips slightly curled, a revelation of self-sharpening, pinking-shear incisors—an unstoppable wild chatter.
From inside the woods, several nuthatches and jays chime in . . . proxies for the unseen.
The seen: back at home, forty-three turkeys march out of the pines and over the stone wall, one bird at a time—the collective voice of dyspepsia, a battalion of hungry nomads. Assemble under the feeders, across the lawn, in the garden, the raspberries, the upper pasture, the compost pile. A methodical, dignified feeding bonanza. Front yard on-the-half-shell. From the bedroom window, I watch, bewitched, as more than six hundred pounds of wild birds sweep through, vacuuming acorns, sunflower seeds, dried raspberries, scapes of my recent meals. Although spring remains an echo from the far side of the sun, one male, displaying full regalia, strutting. Am I the only one paying attention?
Looking out the bedroom window onto the morning's unsullied breadth, in deviance of barking electronics, political denial, an unraveling planet, and vaccination protocol, I give full attention to the business of turkeys.