January 31

January at an end. I know that I should accept and even anticipate each day, even those in the midst of our New England winters. Still, I admit that I am usually pleased when January has come and gone.

Seasonally, the weatherman indicates that winter begins in December and lasts through February. I like this framework, even if I know it doesn’t really apply. This would mean that we are 2/3 finished with winter, and February’s relative shortness makes it seem as if spring is possible, if only around the corner.

According to the celestial calendar, March 21^st or thereabouts is the equinox, and the unofficial acknowledgement of our vernal return. This means winter is really just a month old at this point, following the solstice, and I for one find this disheartening.

No. Winter holds tightly here, regardless of meteorological or astronomical calculations. It will also hold fast despite what the perennial prognosticator indicates in two days. I am resolved to ride it out and take a page from experience. It will be winter until it stops being winter, no sooner.

January 30

Deep in the woods early this morning, a fox was calling a warning cry. It was a strange and unsettling sound – a series of clipped barks and earnest cries that signaled some sort of danger.

We haven’t seen the foxes around here since the fall. I was beginning to think that the frequent vixen from late summer had moved on or worse come to some unfortunate end. We enjoyed watching her throughout last summer, coming and going in search of food to bring her litter of three that sheltered beneath an out building down the road at Robinson’s Greenhouse. She became quite tame in a way, not minding if we stopped to watch her trot by through the woods.

I had begun to think that she had moved on this fall, after the kits were grown enough to be on their own. This morning was a bit of a shock, really. The fog from yesterday still lingered, and the waning gibbous moon filtered through enough to give the landscape a twilight look, though the trees of the lower woods were hidden through the mists. I stepped out on the deck to feel the air and to listen to the water dripping off the roof (which is always a pleasure in January). Apart from a gentle southern breeze that stirred the trees and moved the wind chime, it was fairly quiet.

The cries came out of nowhere, from far off in the lower woods. It was startling to the point that it really did make the hair on the back of my head stand up, as the saying goes. I can only imagine what would cause such distress. Perhaps a fisher cat or coyote was on the hunt. The cry was so unnerving that I decided in no way was I to investigate.

Only one other time and also in winter, can I recall such a visceral cry. Something must have attacked a rabbit near our house, and the cry of what must have been its death throes were simply frightening to hear.

January 29

After a week of temperatures in the teens, a warm front came in last night, brought on by a steady wind and light rain. With the snow cover still trapping the resilient cold of the week prior, the humid air turned as foggy as I’ve seen it here, to the point that the mailbox at the end of the driveway was lost in the mist.

A fog like this in winter is strangely out of place, particularly as the driveway remained glazed from the mist that froze in contact with the still cold pavement.

January 28

I took an old glass rolling pin, which is hollow inside and sealed with a screw cap top, put charcoal chips down in one end, and filled it roughly with 1/3 full of good soil. To hold it, I crafted a stand out of wood, designed so that it held either end allowing the central tube of glass and soil to stand upright, with the screw top located at the top of the roller, so that I could open it periodically to water within.

Into this terrarium I sprinkled several tiny seeds from the Sweet William Catchfly that grows wild near our knot garden out front. I had collected the seeds last fall, placing them in a small labeled vial and on an old typeset shelf hanging on the wall where 30 to 40 other such vials reside with collected seeds of differing wildflowers.

It is a small accomplishment really, and the chances of the seeds germinating within in the relatively cool temperatures of our January house may be low. We do such things at this time of year precisely to build our hope that life and growth will soon begin anew. These hopes we nurture just as I will do with this terrarium; that with the right amount of light and warmth and luck and timing we may be fortunate to witness another beginning in the cycle of the seasons.

January 27

January Wolf Moon

This night feels like one in which wolves may come silently across the fields, pausing only to gaze skyward and cry out. We have no wolves here, but coyotes visit us from time to time, and their strident calls in the dead of night are as familiar and similar to those of their lupine cousins.

We particularly hear the coyotes in the early fall, when the nights are just starting to cool enough, yet our windows may still be open to let in the evening fresh air. On these nights, the sounds of the waning crickets and evening flying squirrels are the usual chorus, which is a pleasant background for falling asleep. This makes it all the more jolting to be interrupted by the eerie barks and pitched calls of the coyote packs, ranging somewhere in the fields across the road.

Tonight is a night suited for wolf calls, like some beast made living in a Jack London story, sitting on the knoll in the Cournoyer field and howling upward to the clear moon.

January 26

The angle of the noon day sun is just perceptibly higher in the sky than it was a month ago For the first two weeks of January, I kept fooling myself into believing that this were so, but now I do think it to be true.

It is a minor victory as we’ve turned the corner from the solstice, marching ever onward in our seasonal shift.

It is more apparent in the coming of the dawn and setting of the sun; our days are lengthening. Still, this doesn't mean we can start putting away our winter clothes for lighter wear. It is still cold out, after all, and thought the sun’s rays strike more directly and for longer with each passing day, they are yet oblique enough to generate much warmth. Any that we do receive must arrive with a coming front, normally on the heels of an incoming snowstorm that blossoms from the southern Atlantic states and works its way to New England.

Patience though. Soon the sun’s rays will penetrate deeply enough within the ground and trees, awakening the pulse of life within. Soon enough the frost and ice, glistening now in the noon sun, will yield to the warmth, retreating cold giving way to the vitality of another spring.

January 25

I saw a robin today in the bare branches of our lone apple tree in the front yard. It regarded me for a moment with its dark eye, ringed with a small white band then took flight toward the spruce line across the road.

I so desperately want to think of it as a harbinger of an early spring, but I know that some robins actually do overwinter in our area. What they consume, I can only guess. Perhaps some of the winter berries which still cling to the shrubs. Those robins that I do occasionally see in winter are quiet, where in spring they will erupt each morning in birdsong.

January 24

A loud crack within the house sometime in the middle of the night awakened me, and it took a few moments to realize what it was. Bitter cold had caused something in the house frame to shift enough to give off such a loud snap. I got up to look at the thermometer on the kitchen window, and it registered -5 degrees outside, and I could tell that a moderate breeze also blew.

I hadn’t heard the house crack like that since before we moved here – our old farm house in Kalamazoo would creak and pop in the bitter cold. In truth, I don’t think we’ve had such cold temperatures in years, and I suppose it may be on account of the global warming patterns. To read the accounts of New England winters from decades ago makes you realize that weather temperatures have moderated in the winters. Writers frequently recount bitter stretches of days and deepening snow, where the tendency to sit by the fire and hunker down waiting for a break. We contract in winter, look inward, and conserve our own spirit as well as our bodily heat. The cold outside forces us inward, waiting and hoping. Perhaps this is what our house is simply doing.

January 23

Today is a perfect example of yesterday’s empiricism. This morning was just below zero, again with a light breeze that made the wind chill certainly bitter. There was also a gentle snowfall, with strangely large flakes that I normally associate with wetter snows.

Standing just outside my garage, I watched the snow drift downward and occasionally settle on my dark jacket, each flake so large that it was easy to distinguish the individual patterns. Under more temperate mornings, those flakes are ephemeral, with enough residual heat on the jacket to melt the patterns before they can be clearly seen.

I stood for a while and looked as closely as I could.

Truly beautiful things up close, and they do seem to be unique to one another, built on a general rule of having six sides. Some were greatly branched and intricate beyond imagination, while others were so simplistic they reminded me of the child’s craft of folding paper and using scissors to create a simple flake. I couldn’t resist using my breath to watch them fade away, the solid molecules picking up enough energy to liquefy – the outer points first giving way, followed by the center hubs.

It is overwhelming to look at the snow pack in our yard, now just at seven inches deep or thereabouts. All those snowflakes, one upon another, pattern after pattern, seemingly endless forms of creation that serve no purpose of which I am aware. Eventually, they will all yield to the coming warmth, returning to the ground or to the air.

January 22

A morning for winter empiricism like no other. Let me explain. I am overly sensitive to this subject, sometimes to the point of righteousness which in the end probably doesn’t accomplish what I intend.

It was bitterly cold this morning, somewhere near 0 degrees with a light breeze out of the Northwest across the field and toward the house. I bundled up to take a walk around the Cournoyer fields at 5:00, well before even a glimmer of dawn.

I may have looked a little silly, bundled up in several coats, a hat, facemask and such, all to ward off the bitter wind chill.

The walk was fine enough, with freshly fallen snow crunching faintly beneath my feet, but the experience reminded me of what it must be like to be an astronaut on a spacewalk. I couldn’t feel the wind on any part of my body. My hearing was nearly blocked from all the layers, with the exception of my breath which when exhaled in the masks and earmuffs made a noise like a scuba air hose.

Aside from my motion (and what I could barely glimpse through slitted eyes), there was really no connection to the walk. My experience was separate from the sights, sounds and feelings that so normally are a part of being “in” the moment – the empirical nature that is the essence and beauty of simply being outside.

I watch my own students on campus, and in so many ways their own behaviors embody this empirical disconnect. They, like so many, spend more time living and communicating virtually with devices and one another that they have forsaken the genuine importance and worth of experiencing, of feeling and being an active participant in their surroundings.

Winter is a time for such battles, with the harshness of a morning walk filling my head. There’s nothing better to crystallize this point than to remove the coverings, of which I did. Boy, it was cold and felt of winter, so austere.

January 21

The cold has brought the Junco’s out in a frenzy to the feeder. I am fond of these winter birds, for they remind me of a well-dressed diner, who is content to browse on the ground for his fare.

The juncos are a harbinger of winter, normally arriving in late November as they leave their summer breeding sites up in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont to settle for the winter in our neck of the woods, among other places.

They frequent the feeder area, usually in larger groups, and are fairly sociable birds, though not quite as gregarious as the chick-a-dees. They tend to hop and scratch more than chick-a-dees will, trying to dislodge seeds below the snow or soil. When startled, the juncos are clear warning signs of an intruder, like a passing falcon or red-tailed hawk. As if in unison the Juncos scatter in all directions, quickly vanishing to the underbrush or forest to escape a threat. I suppose the markings that so nicely camouflage them in the summer are a liability in the snow cover, as the darkened tops are more easily distinguished against the snow.

January 20

Warmer today, near 45 degrees, with a frost-driven wind all day. The snow is melting quickly in the brilliant sun, and now the tracks we saw yesterday stand in relief. It is a curious thing, those tracks of the animals and of us are the last things to completely melt, which then leaves the compressed snow of the track impressions plain to see against the revealed detritus of last fall’s leaf litter and Earth.

The wind spells change, and the front is bringing arctic air tomorrow. January is living up to its namesake – Janus, two faced it has been this year more than I can recall in the past. Back and forth we’ve gone from thaw to freeze.

January 19

A light snow happened last night, putting down just under 4 inches and making everything around look cleaner and more winter like. With the morning sun shining through the lower forest trunks, the back woods took on the look of an Ansel Adams photograph, all contrasts of light and dark, straight lines of branches set against one another in snow.

We walked the access road at midday, silently creating our own path through the snow, crossing over tracks from various creatures that had trafficked there through the night. This is the real wonder of new fallen snow. It reveals the passage of what normally goes unseen, often no more than a stone throw from your own dooryard.

We recognized rabbit tracks, squirrel, several deer, and something that looked like a large cat’s print. We’ve only seen the bobcat once, last fall as it basked in the lower garden sun early in the morning. It stayed long enough to hunt a few birds to no success then furtively padded away. The tracks today are possibly from this same cat.

January 18

I mentioned flying squirrels, and we’ve experienced these first hand. Since moving to our wooded home, we suspected that flying squirrels were about when we began to notice their high-pitched shrill of a call in the summer and fall nights. A year or so went by without any sightings, until one late fall day I received a phone call from Sarah in the middle of the day. She had a close encounter with one of the shy little troublemakers.

Evidently, one had slipped down the chimney pot that feeds into our beehive oven next to the big Rumford fireplace. Sarah heard the racket of something scurrying around in the fireplace room. When she opened the door to investigate, there was the flying squirrel, clinging desperately to one of the curtains next to the window. It evidently had the good sense to try to escape.

Sarah opened another one of the windows in the room, grabbed a long handled broom and placed it gingerly next to (beneath) the squirrel, whereupon that little creature transferred its grasp to the bristles. After moving the broom slowly to the open window, the squirrel made a quick leap into the void and glided away down to the woods not 20 feet from the house.

The only other encounter happened just this fall, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. We were out in the front yard finishing up raking the last of the oak hold outs when all of a sudden I saw this object fall from one of our tall maples that sits next to the garage.

One of our terriers (Tag) saw it drop to the ground. He rushed over and reached it first, and my only glimpse as I approached confirmed that he bit into some creature that was momentarily stunned after the fall. Tag was reluctant to let go, and I can only imagine what was going through the dog’s mind about squirrels just dropping from the sky like manna from heaven.

The squirrel lay dead on the ground, and I grabbed a stick to help transfer it to the woods. Flying squirrels really are beautiful to see; the distinct separation of brown fur on its back from its whitened under belly, with its large skin fold between its legs and large darkened eyes. It is unmistakably cousin to the grounds and reds but adapted to its own way of life that makes it a curious and beautiful thing.

January 17

We keep a birdfeeder just outside the sliding door of the sunroom, set on the end of a shepherd’s pole that is driven into the grass. Each morning my wife Sarah fills the tube full of black sunflower oil seeds and puts any excess in a little pile on the edge of the porch.

After weeks of this daily practice, the area around the feeder is littered with the cast offs that birds pull out of the feeder and drop on the ground below. It gives the snow a deeply peppered look.

I am watching around the feeder today, only because we have this jittery red squirrel whose antics around the porch are irresistibly comical. The red squirrel is one of among several resident squirrels that consist of roughly five ground and our singular red. We also have flying squirrels that live among the trees, but as they are largely nocturnal, we rarely see them and only occasionally hear their calls.

Our red typifies the petulant manner that Beatrix Potter so aptly describes in several of her children’s stories. He darts about defiantly often stopping to posture with two legs pushed forward and head held upright, chittering his warning call and briskly flicking about his tail.

Defiance will just as quickly give way to retreat when a passing shadow or sudden noise startles this mercurial little thing.

He is a hoarder that one, like all such rodents, and I suspect that the easy pickings of the sunflower cast-offs provide a ready supply of energy. This is particularly true as I believe the red may have forgotten more buried caches than he can remember, and what’s to worry when food is provided?

January 16

I wrote before of the brilliance of the evening stars in the winter skies. Much depends on the cloud cover, of course, and it is the case that we so often have leadened skies in January, which cover the sun and the nightly stars.

This makes the clear nights all the more spectacular, when the stars seem as twinkling pinpoints against the dark of space. These stars seem closer in winter as if we could sweep our hand across the sky to gather them together.

Summer skies lack this character, as the evenings are more often laced with humid air that carries the scents of verdant growth. It is this very air that gives us such wonderful sunsets and twilights that linger on. But this gives way to starry skies that are seen through a humid sheen, however so slight, that the stars look more filtered and dream like.

Though the summer nights fulfill the senses in their own way, for me the skies of January fill us with an austere clarity, of contrasts of light and dark, cold and warm, life and beyond.

January 15

I awakened this morning just after 4 am and out of habit went to make a small pot of coffee to help get things going. Also out of habit, I glanced out the window over the sink, first to look at the outside temperature (28 degrees) and then to see if the sky was clear.

Just on the western horizon lay Orion, although this morning it sat on his right side, slowly moving toward the treeline. In truth, only the two bright stars that form his shoulders, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix plus the trio of the belt stars were really visible, but even so the familiar pattern was recognizable.

Given my viewing last evening at 5:30 and this morning’s at 4:00, I suppose the best time to view Orion in total would be midnight. The constellation would then be nearly at zenith, which is the optimal place for star gazing, as the light from the distant stars passes directly through the atmosphere. On horizon, the light is more filtered through the air, reflected and refracted ever so slightly that the twinkling is more pronounced. Midnight is best for Orion in January, but who wants to brave that hour in the cold?

January 14

With the large cold front that arrived late yesterday, our January thaw came to an abrupt end. Really a part of me was relieved, for this thaw was strangely warm and lasted too long, though I admit to liking the early taste of spring. However,  I was becoming concerned that the trees would start to respond in bud too early or that there would be an unusual insect hatch; it was that warm.

Often after the front passes in the winter, when the winds dissipate and the sky remains clear, the evening stars can be brilliant, particularly if the moon is closer to new. This evening was just so. Brilliant.

Orion rose just after 5:30 this evening, sitting sideways on the eastern horizon. I grabbed my small cassegrain telescope and sat on the back porch, where the familiar stars of his belt and sword came just into view over the top of the trees in the lower woods.

Just within the sword rests the great nebula, visible to the naked eye as a cloudy path among the resident starts. Though my modest telescope, the nebula takes up the field of view as a milky white and ethereal cloud, with numerous stars within.

I sat for a minute or so, letting my eyes adjust to the dark, looking at the nebula and allowing my mind to wander. The image looked winter-like, with shades of whites among the blackness of space and stars strewn throughout like snowfall collected on the pine boughs in the woods below.

January 13

The thaw is to continue only for another day, then the weatherman tells us that winter will return in earnest. I checked my barometer this morning, and sure enough the high pressure which has dominated these past few days is giving way to a change.

This thaw has been a welcome relief.

Last night, the snow continued to melt on the roof, and I listened to the dripping sounds of water falling from the eaves, thinking that it sounded like an evening spring rain, gentle and soft as it falls drip, drip from the roof to be collected in the warming ground.

January 12

Our son called down to us from his bedroom just before dinner, as the fading twilight made it still possible to see into the woods from his bedroom window. He had spotted a barred owl not 40 feet from his window, just inside the border woods on the north side of the house. The own was perched on a bare branch of the large white pine that dominates this portion of the woods. It was sitting still, occasionally turning its head to and fro, I suspect searching for its own dinner vole or even rabbit.

We hear the owls particularly this time of year, either in the early morning as they call to one another or in the evening twilight. The horned owl is the more familiar, with its comical “who who” call and repeated answer. I once had a conversation of sorts with a horned owl in the early predawn last fall. It started a call from far away in the lower woods, and I answered from the back porch. Back and forth we went for nearly five minutes, with the owl moving closer and closer every so often, as it tried to figure out what sort of relation I was. I have to admit that I took a little conceit that my call had garnered such an official curiosity.

The barred owl is another thing altogether. Its call has been described as a kind of “who cooks for you,” and this does capture the essence. I’ve tried calling to the barred owls when I’ve heard them in the woods, but I suppose my dialect for barred isn’t up to par.

From my son’s window, we could see both the owl and a short distance through the woods the road that passes before our house. Just then, a person came walking up the road, and we watched the owl slowly and silently track the passerby with its head. The walker was unaware of this beautiful creature so close by, just as I suspect that the owl was unaware of our watching it from our window.

January 11

Down the access road from our house, just after it takes a bend toward Asnebumskit Pond, there is a cluster of white birch trees set back roughly fifty feet into the woods. It is a grouping of six trees, with their individual trunks meeting commonly at the base and each trunk going off in its own direction. I’ve noticed that many birches form this arrangement, possibly having started as shoots from a mature three that felled long ago.

They are beautiful in winter, especially when the diffuse light of a gentle snow or even winter fog darkens the background just enough to contrast their whitened bark.

There really aren’t that many birch trees around here, at least there aren’t as many as I’m told existed in this area years ago. Ecologists claim that the birch prefers a colder and somewhat moister climate, and the global warming patterns of the past 20 years have shifted the growing niche of birch trees northward. It’s too bad, for I enjoy seeing them in any season.

When I was young, spending summers in Northern Michigan, we used to make crafts out of the birch bark. Native Americans have long made use of birch trees, from using the bark as a covering for canoes, as a water container, and even as a food substitute. The Ottawa and Ojibwa tribes still carry on a decorative art of making small boxes out of birch bark, festooned with animal and flower designs on the surface made out of porcupine quills. My mother used to purchase these and keep them in our cottage, and I liked to open the boxes to smell them, for the Ojibwa would line the edges with dried sweet grass. It would smell like perfumed summer sunshine, and the smell lasts for years.

We would find a suitable white or even paper birch, one with a large trunk and pristine bark. Then we’d take a pocket knife and cut just a few layers into the bark, making a large square cut on the trunk about the size of a sheet of paper. We’d carefully take the edge of the knife to lift one of the corners away from the tree and slowly peel out the entire square whole.

It had the feel of thick cardstock. The inner side would be beautifully tinted in light and darker brown, matching the white and black patterns on the outside. On this inner side, we’d write poems or sayings or draw pictures. Then we’d light a match and slowly burn the edges of the square to give a burnished look.

January 10

A few days ago I wrote of the promise of spring, and I am particularly thinking of this today. Inevitably and thankfully in the midst of the winter season, when we start to lose hope of ever seeing the grass again or the strident calls of the emergent insects or the return of songbirds to the dooryard, the seed catalogs arrive in the mail.

They have nearly the same effect upon us as do any exotic travel brochures. We browse from page to page looking at the beautiful images of fruits and vegetables in full ripeness or of wildflowers mundane to unique. Yes, there are familiars, like places we have frequented. And there are rarities within that we might like to try and plant, as an adventure to attempt when the season arrives.

Seldom do we purchase seeds from these catalogs (and it makes me wonder why they keep us on their list). Still, we enjoy them simply as a diversion through winter, an anticipation of what is to come, and a remembrance of seasons past.

January 9

Not everything associated with the thaw is a welcome relief.

The sustained warmth and sun on our roads has caused frost heaves to occur. These are curious things to me, as we didn’t have frost heaves where I was raised in the Midwest.

As I understand it, the warming temperatures during the day melts some of the frozen ground, including any within and beneath the road bed. Then, when the temperature drops below freezing at night, the water re-freezes, and as ice expands, the resultant pressure pushes upward and outward with such slow and yet incredible force that even roadbeds are buckled.

It is a commonality of New England, the frequent thawing and refreezing, especially during late winter, a costly nuisance to road maintenance where cracks and potholes form with time.

January 8

Today is a promise of what will assuredly come in a few months.

At midmorning, the temperature rose above freezing with the rising sun and calm winds. Our January thaw is temporary, we know, yet at its outset we can’t help but feel rejuvenated thinking that winter will release its grip and spring will one day arrive.

My favorite part of the thaw are the earthy smells that carry on the breeze. Just last week, my winter walk on our access road into the woods was cold and snowy and in every way felt like January. The sun had seemingly little warmth, and there was none of the woodsy smells.

Today is almost a spring-like feel, and this same walk hints at life reawakening. There are the sounds of water dripping off the laden boughs of the evergreens, and what gentle breeze passes carries the familiar smells of leaf mold and soil and humid Earth. I walk in my footprints of last week, when the snow was nearly a foot deep, and now those places that I compressed with each step are nearly melted through, revealing the Earth and detritus of last fall.

We know that winter will return soon, cruelly in a way to remind us that the long haul is still ahead. But we are turning the corner on January soon, and the sun is ever so slowly getting higher in the sky. These brief glimpses of spring are our reminder and hope that cycles do come around, that nothing lasts forever, and with patience there is reward.

January 7

We’re in the start of a January thaw today, with temperatures in the upper 30s, brilliant skies and barely a breeze. Mostly because I wanted an excuse to go outside, and partly because I thought I should shovel the snow from the porch, I went out to the back yard just before noon.

There wasn’t a whisper of breeze, and the midday sun was blissfully warm on my face, so much so that I just closed my eyes and tilted my head slightly back, like one of the Easter Island statues.

It was after a minute of this that I heard them down in the forest that borders our back yard. Unmistakable. Two Pileated Woodpeckers were calling to one another in their laughing sort of a trill. Pileateds are beautiful birds to behold, especially if you are fortunate to be close enough to watch them at work carving out a hole. With a striking red cap, black body and banded face, the contrasts of this large bird are simply beautiful. Unlike the smaller downy and hairy cousins, the Pileated tends to be a shy bird – which is why you more often hear them deep in the woods rather than see them near the house.

A rare treat for me. No sooner did I hear their calls then did they both fly in parallel over the house toward the field across the road. As distinctive is their call, their flight is equally recognizable as a series of rising flaps and falling rests, a mixture of flap-up, flap-up, rest down, flap-up, flap-up.