Snow falling on cedars — and firs, and hemlocks, and salal…

Snow blankets the front path to The Nuthatch on Tuesday.

IT DID SOME SERIOUS SNOWING on Center Island in the past 24 hours.

We’d had a light frosting now and then since the weekend, but Tuesday afternoon the mercury was frozen in the mid-20s and the slate-gray sky decided flurries were a bore. It opened up and snowed.

Last night, Barbara and I doused the lights in the cabin, switched on the outside lights above our wall of windows and watched “Snow Theater.”

By Wednesday morning nine inches blanketed the island.

P1290656 The snowcap on our feeder Wednesday morning: Cold and hungry birds have depleted our stock of birdseed. Sorry, spotted towhees.

We’re living off the larder. Pulling on snow boots to tromp the buried roads. Tempted to build a snowman on the blank whiteboard that is our airfield.

Stay warm, stay safe. We’re hunkered happily.

Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens, 1921

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.