7:02 a.m. 52 degrees, Wind SSE 5 mph. Sky: glum and overcast, raining, a chronically gray morning. Permanent streams: after last night's rain, a little louder and fuller. Illusion or reality: a month ago, squeeze a stone to recover water. Intermittent streams: on the go. Wetlands: marsh somber and lifeless, sans mist. Pond: a mirrored-surface, yellow, brown, and pine-green. Two mergansers rush out of the far cove, stir capsized reflections, then depart on caffeinated wingbeats. Pitch into the wetlands, welcomed by a growing pool. I studied their heads for a nanosecond . . . still don't know their age or sex.
A brown creeper wanders up yellow birch, long-tail pressed to trunk, picks through peeling bark, soldiering on in the dim woods. Its voice thin as the mist and barely louder. Three or four off-key nuthatches toot tin horns, all red. A white-breasted nuthatch on pine, a little bird in a massive tree, wanders down the trunk, almost hidden by bark furrows, a creeper in reverse. Along the hem of the pond, a white-throated sparrow, an altogether gorgeous face—cream-colored crown stripes and throat and canary-yellow lores—reaps weed seeds, eaten on the spot, stems doubled over under the weight.
For crows, my compost pile is a feeding station. The morning after I empty the kitchen bucket, they're there, picking and probing, gabbling—a hollow, harmonious knocking, a rapping of sticks. One flies off with an eggshell, the other stale bread. For milksnakes, my compost pile is an incubator for oval eggs. For garter snakes and American toads, a source of worms. For worms, a source of food. One late winter afternoon, a male snow bunting paused on the compost-pile fence, a black and white associate of polar bears, bound for the Arctic. For black walnut and sugar maple, the compost pile is fertilizer, a wellspring of nitrogen and phosphorous and calcium; roots plumb the depths invisibly and slowly. Sometimes, when flipping compost with a pitchfork, I strike root or uncover eggs or a worm crammed in the mouth of a snake; sometimes, a jewel-eyed toad swaddled in consolidated food scraps, napping just below the surface. Then, I carefully return the compost and say . . . thank you.