An early snow, brisk winds force only short outings for the two chihuahuas living under this roof, their thin tooties just not able to insulate, although Stray prefers nights out, his orange coat fully down and adapted from his feral days, now “domesticated” for what seems to be three years when we were adopted.

The bitter air comes early this year, overhead are heard the squawkings of southern bound geese, even in dark of night, the city light amplified by the low heavy clouds. Standing on the porch admiring the contrast of a running river against the semi-white embankments, imaginations of heavy snow has me donning skis for a riverside trek; then a fox slurries from Ruth’s blue spruces after hearing my boots crackle the icy wood below.

This morning Poppy heard silent howlings “Letmewin,” our six legs triggered to walk a maze to the sunny riverside door and calls greeted by a Stray after his trackings through five inches of teen degreed snow. Waggling hard pacing alongside the cat, smelling and kissing on what he imagines are remnants of meesies ingested overnight, Stray bold, gentle and without concern aims for the bowls of dry food that “those indoor kitties choose to eat,” and freshly milk poured.

Winter’s entry this year in the Hinterland has flavors of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, sort of racy and settling chords of inevitability, of the need to sustain a pace in order to exit the other side to springtime. Hunkering down was seen in this years festival of the oaks where spawned acorns suppled armies of squirrels and deer, and with the numerous birds who enjoy the black oil seed only to cache them away in remote locations that somehow they revisit in time.

Critters frequent the landscape between the house and river where comforts are numerous: Woodpeckers peckering on the downed trees whose demise the result of contiguous spring-time snow melts of overwhelming proportion, tree bases soaked and stifled, aforementioned fox, squirrel, days ago a deer languishing, snow on its back and sauntering between seed baskets and locating the cups of seed thrown in her direction, activity that generally is reserved for the nesting turkeys that have now retreated to the wind-protected refuges upstream.

This early winter deprived change in the leaves, instead stinging their green with seventeen degree air, curling and sizzling their hue away, many ash leaves left clinging, while the heavier oak leaves fully defoliated, the sun’s rising shadows, long, illuminate a river now frozen, with another night and subsequent morning, I have to ask “Where is Stray?”