哈·柏蘭/Hal Borland
The January wind has a hundred voices. It can scream, it can bellow, it can whisper, and it can sing a lullaby. It can roar through the leaf?less oaks and shout down the hillside, and it can murmur in the white pines rooted among the granite ledges where lichen makes strange hieroglyphics. It can whistle down a chimney and set the hearth-f?lames to dancing. On a sunny day it can pause in a sheltered spot and breathe a promise of spring and violets. In the cold of a lonely night it can rattle the sash and stay there muttering of ice and snowbands and deep-frozen ponds.
Sometimes the January wind seems to come from the farthest star in the outer darkness, so remote and so impersonal is its voice. That is the wind of a January dawn, in the half-light that trembles between day and night. It is a wind that merely quivers the trees, its force sensed but not seen, a force that might almost hold back the day if it were so directed. Then the east brightens, and the wind relaxes-the stars, its source, grown dim.
And sometimes the January wind is so intimate that you know it came only from the next hill, a little wind that plays with leaves and puffs at chimney smoke and whistles like a little boy with puckered lips. It makes the little cedar trees quiver, as with delight. It shadowboxes with the weather-vane. It tweaks an ear, and whispers laughing words about crocuses and daffodils, and nips the nose and dances off.
But you never know, until you hear its voice, which wind is here today. Or, more important, which will be here tomorrow.
一月的風變化無窮。它有時尖叫，有時怒吼，有時呢喃，有時還低吟搖籃曲。它能咆哮著穿過凋零的橡樹，從山上呼嘯而下；它能喃喃低語地遊**在根植於花崗岩礁石中的白鬆林中，那裏岩層處的苔蘚構成了奇怪的象形文字。它鳴叫著往煙囪裏鑽，讓壁爐裏的火焰舞動起來。在陽光明媚的日子裏，它在某個隱蔽處稍息片刻，承諾春回大地和紫羅蘭盛開。在一個孤寂寒冷的夜晚，它又搖響窗扇，不斷低聲威脅要冰天雪地，凍結池塘。