6:33 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 23 degrees, wind NNE 1 mph (back to a winter jacket, ski cap, and mittens). Sky: empty of everything but a pair of commuting crows and the moon, a sliver less than round, descending in the pinkish west. My condolences to dim light and moon shadows, which patrolled the bedroom until daybreak. Permanent streams: ice on overhanging stems, water levels dropping (slightly). Wetlands: panes of ice on still water. Frosted reeds compressed by the weight of winter lean toward the marsh, lean toward their future. Monoecious alders: catkins, elongate and soften, getting ready to spill pollen; female flowers, tiny projections, ruddy purple, getting ready to receive pollen. Goose music . . . a tribute to the season of flux and the imminence of rebirth. Pond: meltwater temporarily glazed, feeder stream opens farther away from the shoreline, its water, dark as obsidian, the perfect foil for disobediently soft ice, pale as moonlight.
Predatory winds pruned limbs and toppled shallow-rooted birches, now prostrate and scattered, the displaced bones of sunshine. Standing dead black cheery fell across the trail, once a favorite of small woodpeckers and bark-searching nuthatches.
Juncos trilling. Robins scolding. Creepers whispering. Nuthatches tooting and yanking. Jays honking and beeping. Song sparrows full tilt, clear, hoarse notes, cheery warbles. Chickadees dee-dee-deeing (no songs). Pileated lampoons the vast and quixotic onset of spring. No matter what the temperature, the red-shouldered hawk hurls vocal darts, piercing the airwaves . . . a bird of the loudest, if not the most profound intentions.
Dirt road reshuffled—ruts and pits, attributed to subsurface flow, freezing and thawing, heavy vehicles, and driving as though on sodium pentothal. Patiently, I await President Biden’s executive action designating Five Corners Road, once and forever, Frost Heaves National Monument.