7:17 a.m. 10 degrees (45 degrees colder than Christmas morning), wind WNW 1 mph. Sky: in the east, hints of peach quickly leach away, a few filamentous clouds tease apart, otherwise mostly clear. Forty miles to the south, the crest of Mount Ascutney. Spruce clad. Cold granite. Rises above the flatness of Connecticut River floodplain, like the Rockies out of the grasslands. Most days screened by haze. Today, a smudge on the horizon. Permanent streams: wherever water hesitates, even for a moment . . . ice. Shapes open water into quirky ovals, serrated and pinched. Extends from the shoreline. Laminates rocks. Stratifies twigs and stems, thickly layered and transparent. Babbles loudly on a cold morning. Wetlands: frosted reeds lean south, marsh a bowl of cold air. Pond: delta closing, three-feet long and a foot wide. Bound by frozen sutures. Delta ice oldest to newest: thin, thinner, thinnest. Thaw-lines fit inside each other, a two-dimensional Russian doll—four pine cones on the surface. Old deer tracks mutate into small iced-over dents.
A morsel of the morning: a lonesome red-breasted nuthatch sounds reveille. No response. Even chickadees sleep, a descent into torpor—a world in the thrall of a cold front.
Last night, I opened the freezer to grab a bag of tortellini. My dinner idled on the lower shelf of the door, next to a hapless pygmy shrew in a film canister (circa 1997) and a vireo in a Ziplock bag, a victim of a window-strike, which I had frozen last August to show my sister-in-law its thick legs. What lurks in the bowels of the freezer, beyond pesto cubes and raspberries, remains unresolved.