6:55 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 34 degrees, wind E 1 mph. Sky: sleepy grade of gray to blue, truancy of warm colors, Mount Ascutney hid behind a curtain of air, thick enough to slice. Permanent streams: upper, panels of ice gone, infusion of melted snow. Captivated by the sounds of a louder, more expansive, deeper flow, a jazzy riff, the Dizzy Gillespie of brooks; lower, wide open in the flat woods, entombed under hard snow and ice on both sides of the road, all the way to the marsh. Wetlands: ground and bent reeds emerge under the weight of the sun. Pileated drums, once; red squirrel chatters, nonstop; chickadees calling, varying numbers of notes, rapid-fire. A discordant ensemble. Pond: I don't trust the ice. Long ago, lured by wintering eagles, I broke the ice on the Neversink River, outside Monticello, New York. Let's hope it remains a past experience. Unlike the fear of weak ice, for a moment, I could imagine seeing the bobcat, again, silent walker of the alders, searchlight eyes and radar ears, tail docked by unseen forces of evolution for reasons I cannot fathom . . . now that's an experience worth repeating.
Roadside maple, the one pileated chiseled, chips on snow like ice-house insulation. Tree, still alive, but opened on both sides, a see-through maple, a window onto the valley—a tree destined, eventually, to be undone . . . like winter.
Above the lower stream, red-eyed vireo nest, idling on the snow, fell last night. Fits my palm like a worn baseball. Dexterous bills, warp and weft of the woodland loom. Bark frame, pliant strips of basswood, cup lined with pine needles. On the outside: decorative birch bark and scraps of wasp paper. It is a beautiful, fastidious creche; soft, safe, insulated, and once suspended from a forked twig. Design honed over millions of years of trial and error—two little birds standing on a twig, weaving. By June, I'm bored with their voices. But, now, in March, the schizophrenic month, the month of temptations, seductions, disappointments, I long for vireos and an end to booster-vaccine quarantine. Give me freedom and a south wind filled with birds.