6:19 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 45 degrees, wind E 1 mph . . . but powers-up mid-walk, stirring pine boughs, rattling naked hardwoods. Sky: dappled with windrows of blues and whites, a momentary mackerel that congeals as I walk. Clouds gilded, silver-white edges. A dearth of warm colors. Permanent streams: upper, an atmospheric drawdown—gentle swirls and soft gurgles accompany nearby robins, both singing and calling. Wetlands: wind picks up, mimics traffic, races across the marsh; wood-working pileated, hidden in the hemlocks, lobs drum-beats over the reeds, while chickadees and juncos, barely audible (to me) . . . songs delivered to more sensitive ears. Sans ducks. Pond: a pair of mallards bolt on my arrival. An oval peninsula of hole-punched ice, otherwise more than three-quarters open. Beneath clear water, pieces of bleached crayfish exoskeleton. Floating on clear water, a band of pond scum hugs the southwest shore, mostly alder pollen and dust.
Spent alder catkins dry and easily flaked—fresh catkins, soft, pliable, and yellow. I shake a branch, puffs of yellow pollen fritter away like breath on a cold morning. Beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) catkins, a third of alder catkins' size, conspicuous along the road. Chickadees ate a few last fall—a fly-by snack. Plenty of catkins remain. After diligently searching, I find one female flower open, tiny, tan-colored, and oval, a bud with a spray of red confetti at the end, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Called styles, these elongated extensions of the ovaries wait for pollen—specks of color amid limitless brown.
Chickadees, flocks fracturing. Males whistling, couples forming, move around the yard as duos. Jays, disruptively voluble, holler in the aspens. Phoebe sounds like a chickadee with laryngitis (or, to be anatomically correct, syrinxitis). Non-stop and harsh, a grating but a welcome voice that somehow avoids inflaming the singer's vocal cords. Creepers singing, a cascade of delicate notes.
The commodity of magic. Morning's smallest gifts . . . Lilliputian flowers and translucent music.