7:21 a.m. 18 degrees, wind ENE 0 mph. Sky: blue-gray and white. A fading pink tinge in the south. Hazy flurries reduce visibility, hide Mount Ascutney, a dusting on a dusting. Valley glazed. Permanent streams: schools of bubbles under panes of ice. Dogs puzzle over my amusement. Between descending rocks, cavities disgorge sound, more bass than baritone, more trombone than trumpet—the harmony of plunging water . . . gravity conducted. Where the pitch flattens, water spreads, sound rises. Wetlands: across the marsh, dark green conifers trimmed in white. Beneath a run of platinum-gilded clouds, the reeds lighten, stem by stem. And, to the northwest, sunshine washes down Robinson Hill, light cradled in the saddle. Pond: surface littered with muted tracks, mostly deer.
White-breasted nuthatch in the hardwoods, red-breasted in the evergreens. Both call. After disemboweling a roadside maple, pileated laughs, harshly and derisively, a private joke. Flies off like a pterodactyl, leaving the snow littered with chips.
One hairy woodpecker territorial drumming . . . a speck of spring. Another softly works a maple branch, chips float down. All around, the coming and going of chickadees. Then, high in the east, a raven. Woodpecker cocks his head, freezes in place, a knot of wood beached on its limb, looks and listens with intent, delinquency of duty. An unknowable and unreachable pause. But the chickadees unfazed, the elegance of indifference.
Four turkeys scratch for acorns in the backyard; two others scratch for sunflower seeds in the front yard. In between, inside my home, refrigerator and pantries full, stove spews heat . . . deep, penetrating, nap-evoking warmth—whiling away the dark days, the simple pleasures of January.
I remember "it'll be over by Easter" and I remember thinking that autumn was realistic for some kind of resolution and vaccines? what did I know. I think about that as I watch the goal lines recede like an ebb tide into this next summer. For me Friday March 13th will be the 1-year anniversary... the pandemic statistics are worst / highest ever and the projections even more bleak but we're acclimated to the news and the death toll and case counts. I appreciate the therapeutic of outdoors and birdfeeders more than ever.
We will likely even miss some introverted protocols of staying home and tuning-in to bird feeders and walking near home when this pandemic is entirely over and the daily office commute and social gathering chatter resumes? Contrast a deep January to the busy season of frenetic activity during heat and light of summer when taking a nap seems unthinkable? I know I will miss reading "Homeboy at Home" and comparing your birds, tracks, trees and sunrises to our own. Ever-grateful, Ted