Yesterday was so cold and windy--a bitter day, with an icy breeze whipping up off the bay--and tonight we're supposed to get a few inches of snow. Yet the light has shifted, the days are longer, and cardinals and chickadees are singing in the bare branches. When I stepped outside into the wind to empty the stove ashes, the avian world was a-spin--gulls and crows careening among the high gusts, a flock of pigeons wheeling over the roofs, nuthatches flickering up and down the maple trunks, jays quarreling on the fence. 

Everywhere the birds sift and flutter, sail and scratch. Last weekend, on a walk amid the Lake Champlain dairy fields, Tom and I watched a courting pair of northern harriers flicker over the brown pastures, their thin cries fading like the squeak of ghosts.

This morning I've got an appointment I don't want to go to. So afterward I might take myself for a walk by the bay . . . I might find the wind, I might discover what the sea birds--the eiders and the buffleheads, the cormorants and the black ducks--are up to on this cold February day.