Wood Roses and Frost Crystals
I went for another walk today. It was wet, and then it was cold, and the ground was frozen. My feet crunch on the frozen leaves. The noonday sun gleams through the branches and made the pathway glisten silver. In the ground are crystals of frost, the same shape and color as quartz, tiny spikes and ribbed squares. There is a plant with black berries. When they die, the berries turn pale grey. They look like they are made of stone, like some New England Pompeii coated them with ash. Some kind of tree covers its berries with little yellow leaves. They fall and drift to the ground. They look like gold coins. The berries are very, very red.
Something rustles in the woods beside the path. I turn, walk ahead to get a better look, and see a rabbit bound away. Squirrels leap between the trees, and I can hear a chorus of birds singing in three-part harmony. I am alone, the only human I can see. I stand still and revel in the silence. There are so many tiny sounds that make up a silence. The twitter of birds, the whisper of leaves, the creak of dead wood.
There is a stream. I leave the path to reach it, clambering throughspiderwebs of thorny vines to a place where a fallen log crosses the stream. Lying on the log, on a heap of smaller sticks and leaves caught against it, I can touch the water that runs past, making a noise sweeter than laughter. Drops of ice like tears hang from drooping leaves.
I half-walk, half-slide down the bank to the place where rock rims the brook. There are little puddles of ice on the stones, but the brook flows by. If it were not November, I would like to cross the brook where I stand, where the water leaps over underwater rocks. Instead, I pull a frost-rimed leaf from the ground and set in on the water. It looks like a swan, with ice for the neck. I watch it flow away.
The evergreen trees carpet the ground with their needles. There never was a carpet so warm or so golden. The treetops sway, gold towers of faraway castles against a sky bluer than blue. No one's eyes are bluer than the sky.
I find a pinecone, small and perfect, fallen with some of its branch still attached. The twig is studded with buds, and two even smaller branches wind around the center one, the one tipped with the pinecone. It looks like a rose, a rose made of wood.
They used to say, the poor in Europe, that the streets of America were paved with gold. They didn't know how right they were, they who only saw the smog and iron cities. The streets are paved with gold, and silver, and bronze. The gold of flower petals, the silver of frost, and the bronze of pine needles beneath the trees under a midday sun.
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If I stay around here taking walks much longer, I'll turn into an Annie Dillard (a nature writer of some repute).
Now I'm all numb. Not in an emotional sense, in a "You just spent an hour and a half at least out in the cold wearing fairly lightweight pants, no wonder you can't feel your legs!" sense.
Thanksgiving, by the way, was fun. It was truly a feast, as defined by "If everyone ate everything, they would be dead." As it was, Debbie spent the night here after throwing up violently. Such is life.
This has been a good day.
Something rustles in the woods beside the path. I turn, walk ahead to get a better look, and see a rabbit bound away. Squirrels leap between the trees, and I can hear a chorus of birds singing in three-part harmony. I am alone, the only human I can see. I stand still and revel in the silence. There are so many tiny sounds that make up a silence. The twitter of birds, the whisper of leaves, the creak of dead wood.
There is a stream. I leave the path to reach it, clambering throughspiderwebs of thorny vines to a place where a fallen log crosses the stream. Lying on the log, on a heap of smaller sticks and leaves caught against it, I can touch the water that runs past, making a noise sweeter than laughter. Drops of ice like tears hang from drooping leaves.
I half-walk, half-slide down the bank to the place where rock rims the brook. There are little puddles of ice on the stones, but the brook flows by. If it were not November, I would like to cross the brook where I stand, where the water leaps over underwater rocks. Instead, I pull a frost-rimed leaf from the ground and set in on the water. It looks like a swan, with ice for the neck. I watch it flow away.
The evergreen trees carpet the ground with their needles. There never was a carpet so warm or so golden. The treetops sway, gold towers of faraway castles against a sky bluer than blue. No one's eyes are bluer than the sky.
I find a pinecone, small and perfect, fallen with some of its branch still attached. The twig is studded with buds, and two even smaller branches wind around the center one, the one tipped with the pinecone. It looks like a rose, a rose made of wood.
They used to say, the poor in Europe, that the streets of America were paved with gold. They didn't know how right they were, they who only saw the smog and iron cities. The streets are paved with gold, and silver, and bronze. The gold of flower petals, the silver of frost, and the bronze of pine needles beneath the trees under a midday sun.
------
If I stay around here taking walks much longer, I'll turn into an Annie Dillard (a nature writer of some repute).
Now I'm all numb. Not in an emotional sense, in a "You just spent an hour and a half at least out in the cold wearing fairly lightweight pants, no wonder you can't feel your legs!" sense.
Thanksgiving, by the way, was fun. It was truly a feast, as defined by "If everyone ate everything, they would be dead." As it was, Debbie spent the night here after throwing up violently. Such is life.
This has been a good day.