Early on a Sunday morning in mid-December there's the subtlest sky that I ever saw. And it's fading by the second. At dawn it was filled with raw, gray clouds. Minutes ago the sunrise replaced them with long streaks of white and tea-stained clouds backed by a blue sky with an occasional gray, ball-shaped cloud.

About to get dressed and do a short hike on the Greenbelt Trail I notice a visitor on our patio. A plump squirrel faces me with its small paws to its mouth, then scampers to the fence top. Looking through binoculars I can see that the squirrel has traces of red in its ears, head and under the tail which flaps up over its head looking like a thin, frayed fur coat worn by a woman who has known better times. You like dancing? At the entrance to the trail I watch two or three squirrels come bounding out of the trees gamboling up and down across the brown leaves with the sheer energy of little children.

My favorite spot on the trail is getting to be around a curve where birds congregate by some trees that still have the sweetest looking blackberries. There's something simultaneously lost and found coming around a bend in the trail when birds hear you and fly off. For a second or two you catch a glimpse of them as clearly as you would in a diorama; a white streak on the tail, or a familiar wing bleating sound. The moment is tantalizing; and as suddenly as it came it is gone. You've lost the unexpected glimpse of beauty but gained the intensity of curiosity. But it will come again and again on the trail.

Last week on the return part of my walk I got lucky. Some birds scattered into a bush but one came out on the path. It was a white-throated sparrow going into winter plumage. I recognized the cinnamon sidebars by its eyes, saw the fading yellow on its chest and the hint of telltale white on its throat. Another came out on a limb and gracefully plucked a remaining blackberry from the branch. Having downed the lush fruit, it stood there a contrast of yellow on gray with striking black, white and brown on its back. A male cardinal, wing beatings in slow motion, its bullet-shaped body almost imperceptibly hanging back, due to constraints of navigating the brush and trees, disappeared into the woods.

This morning my feet meet earth, softened by rain. Hard shadows streak over the path and twist up thick tree limbs. Thinner bare limbs reach to the heavens. At the blackberry spot I luck out again. A white-throated sparrow beneath a bush is chucking up a yellow leaf and a male cardinal in his bright Santa suit is flicking something on a limb. Does this mixed crew routinely forage together?

Coming off the trail a female downy woodpecker alights onto another thick limbed tree quickly making her way up its wide swirls. She seems, literally, to swim across the girth of the tree searching its grooves for insects. I make my way back over a high ridge that I call Cemetery Ridge, which contains the remnants of a 19th century cemetery.

I take note to steer clear of a tree the next time I'm up here. Some months ago it had its base burned by what looked suspiciously to me to be a human made fire. The tree has now snapped where burned and doesn't lie on the ground but is held up, I don't know for how long, by another tree. It's a reminder that the woods, often magical, cannot always welcome hikers and endure fools.