Bittersweet is the star of the show, two days in a row. There’s so little color in the woods, it’s the tiny berries, now sprinkled among the dead leaves that is what there is to notice. Cold and bleak sky. I finally just kneel in the leaves, looking at the berries, and find this cheerful one with wings. January, and no snow for x-country skiing, no ice for outdoor skating. January and the woods are bored. I pass the brook by the railroad tracks and peer down into it, mildly swirling. Photographed like this it looks like a window of blue-swirled glass. There is the prospect of rain tomorrow.

"Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves."
-  Sylvia Plath, Waking in Winter