7:07 a.m. -6 degrees, wind SE 0 mph. Sky: blank, baby blue, a pale rose wash in the south and east. Heat journeys unimpeded into space. My fingers in mourning. The roof of my mouth throbs. Permanent streams: upper, hidden water, frost blooming on honeysuckles, the allusion of flow, barely a whisper. Lower, the two oblong openings, icing over and rimmed in hoarfrost, long, feathery crystals, growing longer with every exhalation of the stream. A hollow tune, more hollow than yesterday, like singing beneath Greywacke Arch. Wetlands: the heart of the valley. A cold air settlement disarms everything but stray thought—a white and beige floor; green and white walls.
Even the red squirrels keep to themselves, silent as stone. Chickadees, of course, ambitious, a cascade of dees out of the alders and Oriental bittersweet. What are they eating? Frost crystals? Hairy woodpecker on ash, the percussive language of the hungry. Together, two ravens, wing tip to wing tip, black in the blue, hoarse and hollow volleys that ride the frigid currents.
Met a friend for a long Pomfret walk, a challenging morning to be in a hurry. Off the Pomfret road, pine grosbeaks heard but not seen . . . first I've heard (or seen) in several years. October 24, 1975, Short Beach, Fire Island: five pine grosbeaks, my lifer, gorged on a surfeit of Russian olives. The Atlantic, gray and belligerent. With a relentless onshore wind, white caps tore off the waves while grosbeaks overwhelmed the olives. Today, cold replaces the rogue surf. Grosbeaks prepared . . . which is why I like them.
Your mention of Russian Olives take me back to when Audubon, in CT, gave them away as wildlife fodder, encouraging us all to plant them. Forty years later, in RI: UGH!!