It’s about to start again—spring, I mean, in all its frantic frenzy. The birds have begun singing courting songs in the mornings despite the birdbath water being solid frozen. Daffodil buds may be shut tight, but their stems grew two inches earlier this week, when we had one of those weirdly warm nights in the midst of what has been a graciously, seasonally cold six weeks.
Before spring springs, I want to honor winter, praise the quiet glory of the winter woods, a time of shapely silhouettes, of shiny, silent stillness. What inspired me to write was the walk Scott and I took a week ago to the skunk cabbage realm, guessing that there might be blooms. They grow in an out-of-the-way bit of bottomland spreading out from a small stream that runs through a forest on a neighbor’s land. All the way there, the forest floor was a smooth orange-brown mottled mat of frozen leaves. It was unusually pressed down and uniform because of the extended snow cover in January, which had melted and refrozen several times before disappearing altogether a few days ago. It was a look we remembered from another decade, a more wintery look than we’ve witnessed in years.
On our skunk cabbage walk, we enjoyed a beautifully open, mostly frozen February forest. Being a creature that listens to day length more than temperature, the cabbage plants had already pushed up their hooded-alien-head blooms in the thawed places of the bog. It was exciting to try and guess at where the ground was frozen enough to hold us as we wandered into the muck where the cabbage lives. We folded ourselves close to the ground to take photos (which, though we take them almost every year, are never nearly as interesting as the real thing).
We headed home a different way and happened into a new patch of woods, for us. This is saying something, since we’ve been wandering these forested hills for thirty years. We knew the fields below and the ridge running parallel, but we’d never walked through those actual acres. The size and height of the trees enthralled us, and we noticed a broad diversity as we moved among them up and down the folded hills. There was a secret feeling to the place, no visible evidence of human disturbance. No mounds or trench scars from skidders, no stumps from previous logging. The only trails were carved by deer hooves– indentations pressed into a graceful line that followed the hillside’s contour or dipped across a gully.
And we happened to be in that place at the winter afternoon perfect time of day when the light slanting through cold, dry air washes everything in pink and gold. The low sun cast a long shadow line from each tree trunk onto the flattened-by-snow expanse of ground; every place I looked was a painter’s glorious canvas–lines of trunks and deep shadow crisscrossed by shadow sketches on the ground merging with branches and twigs backlit in deep blue, their exquisite, delicate patterns covering everything.
There is a clarity to February. The forest is seeable, specific trunk shapes and twig architecture that will be unseen once leaves begin to blur things. Pieces are separated and distinguishable more than in any other season, so much depth of field. Relative distance is easy discern; discrepancies in size and nuances in pattern are articulated; brilliant colors and deep contrasts decorate the edges of the day. Gratitude, perhaps, is the perspective made possible on a clear, cold winter day: the land, dressed in generations of trees, stretched smooth across its bones of rock and clay; our eyes, like fingers, gently touching its entire and sacred body in one blessed glance.