The In-Between Weeks
There is a stretch of February that does not belong to anything. Winter has used up most of what it has to say. The novelty of the snow is long gone, the holidays are far enough back that nobody talks about them anymore, and...
Author: abirdsworld_p59zse
Mending Clothes by the Window
I have been mending clothes by the window. This is not a thing I expected to write a paragraph about, and yet it has become one of the steadier parts of my winter. The basket has been there for years. It is small, lidded,...
The Two Minutes of New Daylight
By the first week of February the days are gaining nearly two minutes of daylight every twenty-four hours. The number sounds small. It is not. Two minutes a day, compounded across two weeks, comes out to almost half an hour by the middle of...
A Night at a Lake Resort in Off-Season
The lake resort in February is a different place than the lake resort in July. The water is locked up under three feet of ice, the rental cabins are mostly empty, and the people you see on the main lodge porch are wearing more...
Suet, and the Birds That Show Up for It
Suet is the unromantic backbone of a winter yard. It looks ugly in the package. It smells faintly of nothing you want to be smelling. It comes in a hard cake that you wedge into a wire cage and hang from a branch and...
The Stack of Books I Finally Touched
The stack of books by the chair has been there since before Thanksgiving. Five books, all things I meant to read this winter, some bought new and some pulled off the shelf in a moment of resolve back in October. By mid-January I had...
Tracks in the Snow Behind the Shed
There was three inches of new snow on Monday night and by Tuesday morning the yard looked like a small museum. Tracks ran everywhere, none of them mine, and most of them were from animals I had not seen with my own eyes in...
Three Days on the Mississippi Flyway
The Mississippi Flyway runs from the boreal forests of Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico, more or less following the river it is named after. In winter, the middle stretch of it, where the Upper Mississippi turns through Iowa and Illinois and Missouri,...
The Heated Birdbath That Changed January
I bought the heated birdbath two winters ago, the year of the long cold snap, when the regular birdbath had frozen so solid that the ice had cracked the basin and I was going to have to replace it anyway. I had resisted the...
A Year on the Same Patch
The first morning of the new year I sat in the same chair by the same window with the same mug and looked out at the same yard I have been looking at for fourteen years. The juncos were on the platform. The cardinal...