It’s been cold. Have I mentioned that? It’s actually normal weather; we’ve just had such mild winters for so long that people forget how it really was. I remember being so cold as a child, the blankets piled up over me, heavy corduroy quilts that my mother made for us. Blanket is such a great word. Those heavy blankets would almost smother you, but in the best way possible, keeping you in place, weighing you down, keeping you safe.

Upon waking up, it is bright and sunny, if you can see through the frost that thickly covers the windows. Once outside, the snow blinds you, it covers everything, like a blanket. We have about a foot, from the other day, and as I walk I can’t help but to be entranced by the constant sparkle of it.

Out across the marsh, the muskrat huts are covered in turbans of white. Foot prints form in trails everywhere, deer and people mainly. These trails will disappear within hours, like I would imagine footprints in a desert might be erased, covered over by sand. The wind has been unstoppable, and the snow gives it a face. It’s a light, dry snow and is lifted easily by the wind, blowing in waves, in plumes, in full on walls at some points.

This weather makes the birds eat voraciously, and I’ve found they go through a full feeder in a week. We’ve got lots of blue jays, who have taken up camp in our apple tree, and even though they drive me crazy and I try to scare them all the time, you can’t help but to appreciate their brashness.

They are beautiful, first off, which I often forget because they annoy me so much. The alert crest, the different shades of blue, offset by a black necklace and a buff gray underbelly. But their attitude! The nosiness, their heralding the others when the feeder is filled as if they were the only ones watching, their bullying to the front of the line for food. When we fill the feeder, a jay will sit on a high branch and scream and scream like a dinner bell. Once humans have left the picture they swoop right down and take their fill.

One day I went outside and heard the call of a northern goshawk. But the loud call—Kiirrr Kiiirrr—was so low in the sky, and when I spotted where it was coming from I was thrown off. The bird was so small, and why would a goshawk be in such a low tree, near the trunk? Well, I followed it with my binoculars, and of course, it was a blue jay imitating a hawk, which, I found out, they tend to do, especially the northern goshawk. I was completely duped for a bit, and I really think the bird was just having fun with me.