6:35 a.m. 28 degrees, wind NNE 1 mph. Sky: a fog-bound valley; visibility less than a hundred yards; frost in the upper pasture but not in the front-yard lawn, cold, deep green, and brittle. Wetlands: a glazed bowl of fog; pale on all fronts; across the marsh, a mere suggestion of trees. Pond: a big white exhalation of heat; tendrils of summer rise and spread, nowhere in particular; shoreline, a slate-colored exhalation of juncos, a shade of twilight closer to black. Across the road, into the hemlocks, cascades of tinkling notes, the residue of their passage.
On a neighbor's lawn, a robin, close at hand, still and cold beneath a white birch. Watches the dogs and me walk by, fluffed up like a stuffy, a harbinger of an exodus. Red-breasted nuthatches and blue jays dominate the airwaves. Swainson thrush in the leaf litter, flicking leaves, a slow-motion mission, searching for numb insects, a lifeline for survival on a cold morning. Not relatively as sedentary nor as trusting as the robin.
Beyond the south edge of the pond, robins move. Twenty or more birds, a treetop flight through hardwoods and evergreens. No time to feed, at least not while I'm watching. Birds from beyond the Hollow left somewhere harsh, head somewhere hospitable. Seems early to me for robins to migrate down the Connecticut River corridor. But what do I know of their lives in Laborador and Quebec? I stare into a weft of hemlock limbs and wonder how many times I'll stoke the stove before they return.
Warblers in the woods. I can't see them. I hear them, perched in the maples. I imagine tiny birds squatting around their naked legs, puffballs against the tyranny of the morning, continuously titrating their feathers . . . waiting like me for an invigorating sun.
Behind the barn door, motionless bats, a party of five.