Dozens of starlings peck the thawing lawn like busy fingers feverish on a keyboard. The landscape through the picture window twitches with life: sparrows, jays, cardinals, and wrens. Robins frolic in driveway puddles. Chickadees climb a rotting tree. En masse, the starlings take off with a wing-beat whir I can almost feel.

The morning sky is not starburst bright. It is not opal white. It’s not a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter, nor is it the dust on the wooden trunk at the end of the bed. It certainly isn’t the electric blue windbreaker hanging in the closet. Maybe it’s a rhinoceros.

OMG! Raining again. Does OMG count as one word or three? Interject a semi-silly question – distract from the fact that it’s raining again. This entire morning of pissed-offedness, I thought, it’s not an atmospheric river. I compare cloudiness and rain data here with other cities. Justify my outrage. Prove I’m not crazy.

Science and astronomy say the days are getting longer (incrementally so). This is not my observation. Today feels darker than yesterday. It rained again last night. What might walking a muddy lane four times a day for two weeks teach one about the world? That it’s saturated and wet? Often, squishy underfoot?

Light on the horizon. Thin fog in the morning. Veils, covers, shrouds, blankets? This scene, hemmed in between my vocabulary and imagination.  Is it an overcoat on our neighborhood? Does it jacket the street or muffle the porchlight? We know this type of fog, eerie in its masking. Hard to grasp. Fog.  

Heavy cloud cover and steady rain shroud the morning in daemon darkness. The fires of the blacksmith’s house have been replaced by a Dunkin’ and its busy drive-thru. The marshy lane furrowed by tire tracks or hoof marks or wagon wheels glistens where the puddles run deepest. Today begins in medieval past.

Snowmelt tuns to fog. The recycling truck pulling its rickety wagon sorting bin bounces down the street dipping and rattling in winter’s potholes.  Men in neon yellow-green hoodies sort the cardboard from the cans from the plastic tubs and tubes. Wine bottles, beers bottles, pizza boxes – we ravenously consume and begin anew.

Three squirrels candy cane stripe their way up the trunk of the front yard maple. It’s warmer but not warm.  Grassy lawn pokes through threadbare snow. Bright air, bright sky, new year. Somewhere, a family struggles through cancer. Somewhere else, someone’s preparing to propose. Endings, beginnings, what we carry year to year.

Two ravens, or maybe crows, squawk from tall pines at opposite ends of the street. The pines become the towers of a castle, large birds standing watch. This is when I want to call them rooks but I look it up and they live across the ocean. So do all the castles.