7:18 a.m. 34 degrees, wind SSW 4 mph (music in the beech). Sky: gray, raw, on the move, a ruffled quilt, horizon to horizon. A dusting of granular snow, tiny balls like upholstery stuffing. Permanent streams: ice . . . deep tunnels and submerged sheets, far more than I expected. Main channels pinched between metastasizing shelves that jut from both shores, oddly shaped like Chesapeake Bay's margins. Emergent rocks are thickly coated. Wetlands: noisy crossbills above a sleepy marsh. I scour the sky and the pines, but I can't find them. Silently, red squirrels keep to themselves. Pond: even though the night was above freezing, the delta froze shut. The surface echos the clouds, gray and ruffled, with a few highlights. Dogs and I lurch along the shoreline, hoping for something more than yesterday's news . . . nada.
Last day of a barely endurable year. Astonishing grace notes of a hermit thrush, an otherworldly song in the early weeks of the pandemic. Then, as time passes, I became hobbled by the constriction of restriction. How do I touch the people I love if I can't leave home? Rescued by a comet with a million-mile tail. Rescued, again, by the conjugation of planets. Repeatedly, staggered by a schizophrenic climate and a leader in diapers. Where would I be without a daily dose of chickadees? Day in and day out, they carry-on regardless of our predicament: their voice, their jaunty antics, convivial and inquisitive, a preamble to every sunrise of 2020. Snippets of their lives ground me (for a moment, anyway). Chickadee: a bird I’m thankful for. Silence my internal voice with endless runs of dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.
I think of the first lines of an e. e. cummings poem: "may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living". I wish you many chickadees tomorrow morning as a new year dawns!
Thank you for taking us along with you. Your posts have been a gift of momentary peace and even joy, and sometimes tears. You and your early morning friends have made a difference in my life. Thank you. Shalom.