Praise Song for the Maple Tree’s First Green

“Nature’s first green is gold,” Robert Frost wrote, “her hardest hue to hold.” Even as a schoolgirl, I understood the paradox of those lines—of green beginning in gold, of leaf beginning in flower—but I had never seen that paradox for myself. I thought it must be a New England phenomenon not replicated in the piney woods of Alabama. An Alabama girl who is drunk on poetry makes allowances like that. I’d never seen the woods fill up with snow, either.

But every year the sugar maples in my Tennessee yard flower in pale catkins, clusters of miniature flowers descending from long filaments. Every year I walk down my street and stand where I can regard the trees in full. From a distance, it’s a miser’s hoard. It’s Rapunzel in her tower. It’s a sun, a thousand suns, come to Earth. I stare and stare, trying to commit it to memory, for tomorrow the flowers will be shrouded by leaves. Because Frost was right: nothing gold can stay.