It always amazes me on sun-bright mornings such as this one how I could have ever forgotten just how much beauty hides in a winter day. The ground is covered in rich brown tones borrowed from curling leaves. Here and there pop up patches of fall-parched grasses just greening, reborn from early rains. And, more than anything else, the stark trees of winter stand like nature’s exclamation points.
How I love the trees of early winter, so sparsely dressed in their few remaining leaves, barely hanging on otherwise barren limbs. Their collective voice speaks in a brusque tongue of richer days gone by and of colder days to come.
But it’s the unspoken story these bared trees tell that helps warm and strengthen me most. For when the trees are full, and green, theirs is a story already told.
Of course they can be put through an unknown dance by late summer winds, or catch the last moments of the setting sun and stand there, shimmering, in contrast to their own strange shadows. But even so, all that they are is in sight. And this is why I love trees in winter: With their last garments of green removed, I feel more intimate with them, as though neither of us can hide anything from one another.
If trees move through seasons — and their loveliness only changes to reveal itself in new forms — then why not consider that Love has Her seasons too? And is any season more beautiful than another, or is it just that we tend to forget those very special elements each has to offer in its own time and on its terms?
Is spring greater than winter? Summer more important than fall? Don’t they really need one another in order to be all that they are?
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