6:59 a.m. 34 degrees, wind S 1 mph. Sky: cold, taut pewter. At the moment, void of visible or audible life. Permanent streams: loudest voice in the woods. Wetlands: dull of color, absence of sound, a mute testament to a world in suspension, the holding of collective breath. The secrecy of a marsh, nothing revealed (to me), reflects the weight of leaden clouds, heavy with sleep. Suddenly, a red squirrel rushes across the road, up a pine, sits on a limb, and gives me a piece of his mind. Left with little else to consider, I savor the squirrel, russet champion of a dull morning. Pond: a regression of ice, both north and south end open. Elsewhere, thin-skinned, feathers and panes . . . couldn't support a daydream.
Raven screams. A loud, disruptive call, then silence. A few moments later, high above the valley, another raven and a crow transcribe an X, crow above, raven below, two black dots moving farther and farther away from each other: one northwest, the other northeast. Black under the pall of a brooding sky.
Closer to home, in the woods beyond the upper stream, a mixed flock of nuthatches and chickadees hijack a humdrum morning. Feeding. Calling. Flitting from tree to tree. Harvesting tidbits of life from bark and twigs and tufts of pine needles. White-breasted nuthatch lands on a consolidated mat of leaves, a bright presence on a dim floor. Flips a leaf as big as he is. Flips another and then returns to an ash trunk. Investigates furrows.
A gathering of blue jays, paragons of busyness, head toward feeders. Woods and yard awash in noise. Mostly, off-key scolding. Prospects for the day immediately improve . . . common indefatigable songbirds save the fabric of the morning, erase melancholy, make a mockery of the mundane.