哈·柏兰/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.
一月的风变化无穷。它有时尖叫，有时怒吼，有时呢喃，有时还低吟摇篮曲。它能咆哮着穿过凋零的橡树，从山上呼啸而下；它能喃喃低语地游**在根植于花岗岩礁石中的白松林中，那里岩层处的苔藓构成了奇怪的象形文字。它鸣叫着往烟囱里钻，让壁炉里的火焰舞动起来。在阳光明媚的日子里，它在某个隐蔽处稍息片刻，承诺春回大地和紫罗兰盛开。在一个孤寂寒冷的夜晚，它又摇响窗扇，不断低声威胁要冰天雪地，冻结池塘。