7:08 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 3 degrees, wind NNW
11 mph (windchill -13 degrees). Sky: pallid and charmless, more white than
blue. The snow squeaks. The wind whines. The air stings. Like gates gone
amuck, pines crepitate with a brittle, frenzied cacophony. I'm
bundled, dressed as one of the rolly-polly Teletubbies, the brown one.
Micro-flurries drift like black-and-white television static. Permanent
streams: lower, an icy highway for a wandering mink. Fresh tracks on powder
snow, two by two. Never leaves the streambed. Over fallen trees and tangled
branches, belly denting snow. Under the road and the snowmobile bridge,
into a jungle of reeds. The owl's marsh, rife with voles and shrews.
Wetlands: for the mink, a welcoming freezer chest. For the barred owl, a
high-energy competitor, another strand in the weft and warp of the food
web. Pileated keeps to himself. The silence of the squirrels. Pond: crossed
by a coyote, otherwise, as Yogi Berra said, in 1961, after Mickey Mantle
and Roger Maris hit back-to-back home runs, *It's* *deja vu all over again*.

A red squirrel digs out three shallow caches of pine nuts. Feeds and
leaves, breakfast on the run. Gray squirrels, which stayed put until the
sun crested the horizon, assemble at the feeders. Joined by six jays, two
hairy and one downy woodpecker, seven grit-gathering doves, two titmice,
and numerous chickadees, too jazzed to accurately count. Nuthatches, both
species, deeper in the woods, feeding themselves without my help.

It's been almost a year since I've left Vermont. Being stuck at home
certainly has drawbacks, but I dwell in a landscape of streams and hills
and a sprawling marsh, where chickadees enliven dark mornings. Life could
be a lot worse.