7:20 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday) 27 degrees, wind SE 1 mph. Sky: flat light, ghost-gray. A stray flurry or two nearly lost against the eyelid of a dim morning. Permanent streams: less and less visible flow. Shape-changing water and air bubbles against ice, fewer than yesterday, more lava lamp than fish school. Wetlands: in a visual, audible, and meteorological holding pattern (for several days). Solitary crow, high up and far off—caw, caw, caw—a digestive rumble. Reminds me, stuck at home in the depths of January doldrums, that no matter how tired and monotonous the valley may appear, no two days are the same. Pond: tediously repetitive, contradicts the crow.
The ambivalence of sunrise: loosened from hemlock, barred owl sails across the road, a silent exhalation, like breath on a cold morning . . . appears, disperses. Big bird. Soft feathers. Inhaled by a dark stand of pine. Vanishes. A true denizen of the winter woods. Shelters in place accepts whatever winter offers. Not a raptor errant. No retreat to gentler climes. Waits above the road, the trail, the patch-cut in the woods, the rim of the marsh, the edge of the pond . . . for slight movement, faint sound. Then, like a phantom, pounces. Sometimes through deep snow, feet first.
Power of an owl. In view for less than five seconds, in apparent retreat. But, suddenly, untethered from complacency, unmoored from internal dialogue, I open to the affluence of a winter morning, far more prosperous than I had imagined.