Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

January 21, 2021: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

7:16 a.m. 9 degrees, wind ENE 2 mph. Sky: altogether flat and uneventful, gray as soiled snow, an absence of sunshine. Permanent streams: the murmur of water under the ice, soothing on a cold morning. Across the flats, bracketed by ice, a lane of water can't wait to reach the marsh. Wetlands: out of a dull green wall, the derisive laughter of a pileated. Hangs in the cold like deep thought. Bird with a one-track mind, again and again, and again. Dogs sit down and chew various body parts. I listen intently for a revelation, a secret that might not otherwise be disclosed if I hadn't paused, fingers numb, cheeks stinging, to consider something other than the changing of the political guard. Purpose achieved, pileated stops laughing. Dogs keep chewing. And I stare into the empty marsh, richer but no more enlightened than before. Pond: inlet frozen shut. Straining to hear the flow. 

Far, far away, a raven calls. Draws closer. Passes overhead, towing his voice behind him. A pair of crows. A hairy woodpecker demurely taps a maple limb. A gentle decree.  Another picks fat from a bag of kidney suet. Titmice and chickadees, puffed like stuffies, take turns on the feeders. Jays and doves elsewhere engaged in purposeful activity . . . likely to do with food.

Flurries punctuate the dull light of a soft-spoken morning, a quotidian morning in need of engagement. I must deflect the cold and extend the crazy thrill of rejoining the Paris Climate Accord yesterday, forward and forward, again. Less moved by the memory of yesterday, dogs chew on.