Week 1Winter Week 1
It was a December of crows.
—Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
When I was young, I craved the expansiveness of heat, the languor of an afternoon so hot the only choice was stillness. I longed for light and color, impatient for the goldfinch to put on his yellow finery, for the hardwood trees to shiver into green.
Age has given me an internal source of warmth, and hubris has given us all a burning planet, but I still love the seasons of light and color. Only when I head outside do winter’s consolations become clear. The small ground birds rustling in the leaf litter are suddenly visible. I can tell the song sparrows from the field sparrows, and the Carolina wrens from the winter wrens. The contours of the earth emerge, fold upon fold, as though I had been seeing before in only two dimensions. On the lake trail, I turn toward the belted kingfisher’s rattling call, and there is the kingfisher himself, his shaggy crest scraping the blue sky from a branch high in the trees.
Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway, and only a fool could fail to find the lesson here. The cold roots of the sleeping trees along the streambed are even now taking in water. One day soon that water will rise and spring into the world in a rush of tight green leaves poised to unfurl. Everything that waits is also preparing itself to move.