6: 44 a.m. 36 degrees, wind W 2 mph. Sky: a flat, textureless blue-gray that evolves into an archipelago of clouds in a white sea, mostly small and smooth, one series gently curved like the letter J or the Hawaiian Islands. An absence of highlights. Permanent streams: ice on emergent stems and along the rims of backwater pools, gone elsewhere. Wetlands: like the sky, flatly colored and without highlights. Blue jay above the marsh heads north, a labored, vulnerable flight, nowhere to hide. Pond: broken-glass surface, shards and slivers of ice separating everywhere except the south cove, still sealed but thinner.
Two red-breasted nuthatches toot in the gloom. A pandemic's silver lining, the joy of staying home for eight months, of being entertained by chickadees and nuthatches and blue jays . . . back to basics. Three months from their first child, Becky and Casey, and here I am with birds and clouds, grandpa's training wheels.
I cup my hands to my ears to gather in the nuthatch calls, slowly turning from left to right, a self-made parabolic reflector, an owl with external ears (or an elderly Mouseketeer). The soft, swish of air, more of a conch-shell experience, does little to amplify the nuthatches . . . but I do hear memories breaking in the parlors of my hands. I'm a little boy at the beach. My father hands me a moon snail shell, round and as white as a sunbeam. I hear the ocean in the deep, spiraling interior, an endless roll of the surf—the magic of boyhood on the beach, of blind obedience to the cadence of life.