7:19 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday), 27 degrees, wind SSE
1 mph. Sky: Clear with a peach wash. October fog, November temperature,
late March feel. Permanent Streams: overnight dusting speckles ice. In the
flat woods, where water, in a level run, delivers freight to the marsh,
layered and growing ice-shelves extend from the shore, squeezing ephemeral
canyons . . . tighter and tighter. Wetlands: beige reeds residue in a bowl
of chowder-thick fog. Extends mid-way up evergreens along the western
shoreline. Crown of pines and hemlocks poke through a band of mist that
hovers like ringside cigarette smoke above Mohammad Ali and Zora Foley
prize-fight, circa 1967. Frost on sausage-shaped alder catkins. Tiny
crystals. Pond: feeder stream opened a bit, otherwise a duplicate of
yesterday and the day before . . . and the day before. Deer artist
elsewhere, old tracks hardly suggest deer.

Today, no robins. Yesterday, they visited roadside bittersweet. Vines lace
pines together; freeze-dried berries kept robins alive—flecks of red litter
the snow.


Overnight influx of red-breasted nuthatches and chickadees—headed either
north or south—a riotous outpouring of *toots* and *dees*. One nuthatch
wanders down a pine, blood rushing to its head. Pokes and pecks at scaly
bark. Eats something too small for me to recognize. Others forage in tufts
of lichen, clusters of pine needles, cages of suet.

Sunshine brightens and then devours fog. Jays argue. Crows scream. I stand
in the front yard, sun on my face, dogs by my side, humming a tune from the
nineteen-sixties. With the ringing of the Post Mills churchbells, colonial
sound floats over Robinson Hill. Makes me recall the wildest, the most
primordial sound of my childhood. Jews didn't ring bells; they blew the
ram's horns, like a Viking's call to arms or an Arowak addressing dawn on a
conch shell. The sound of the shofar made my spine tingle, the reward
for enduring fours in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Winter
sunshine and churchbells, instigator of tender thoughts, and familiar
birdsong.