Strange Days, The End Is Near!

I wake up with the light. Magnified by so much snow, it blushes the windowsill with a rose glow, and with the winterbirds piping in the lilac tree, and my husband radiating next to me, so hot I sleep in just a sheet, I can almost trick myself out of January, into spring.
I want to think there are buds on the trees, that the window is opened, that an earthy breezy seeps in. That maybe the crocus are peeking through the last of the snow in the garden, questing up for the sun with their green fingertips, and the robins will arrive at any moment.
But the alarm clock goes off, and the weatherman says more snow, and maybe birds, will fall from the sky by Wednesday.
We live in strange times.

When the train was late again that day, on the closing of November (the third time in a week; that's how you know it's winter) and I watched a bunch of blackbirds wheel and swarm, explode and reverse, I was thinking of people I loved, scattering the country, migrating their seasons. I was thinking of the unseen concert of our comings and goings, how we've splintered and regrouped over years, the magnet hearts that draw us.
Swollen with new hope and comforted despite the gray, and the cold, and the leaving sun, I thought, "We are like birds, we know where to go." I abandoned the train and just walked home, whistling "Bye Bye Blackbird," a little off key, without a trace of irony or the slightest ghost of foreboding.
So much for omens.
Or maybe I'm just losing my psychic abilities. But I didn't see the New Year coming, with all its cracks and catastrophes. Thundersnow, and the suffocated south. New York trapped in ice and blackouts. The frays of fish washed dead on shores, devil crabs in droves, and red snappers in New Zealand by the hundreds with their eyes gone missing. Thousands of birds that dropped from the sky dead and heavy and scientists who only say (with too much confidence and not enough explanation) cause of death - High Impact Trauma. Impact with what? Are the aliens coming? Or is this the Wrath of God on the Gays like the lady on the Christian network says?
My head is full of lists and names: a cloud of red-winged blackbirds first, and followed by a worm of robins. A clattering of jackdaws fell in Sweden with a murder of crows (and no one thought the pun was funny anymore) and then there was the scourge of starlings and the plague of grackles, and lastly, sadly, almost sweetly the pitying of turtledoves that fell down on the streets of Rome.
Whoever chose the collective nouns for birds knew more of omens than I.
And now a wondering dread sets in, and I don't feel singing or smiling and safe.
These days I avoid the train altogether. Though every morning I wish it spring, the storms keep coming one by one. I make coffee and sit at the window, and watch the sky for snow and lightening.
I watch the sky for raining toads, and yes, for fire.