It’s cold again. My body remembers it so well: this falling
toward winter, this time of afternoon light stretching shadows long. The wind
sharpens, making my cheeks blush and my eyes tear up, and there’s a part of me
that clenches up tight, tries to shrink away from the cold and the coming
winter. Spring’s excited whisper is long gone, and the clinging heat of
summer has faded, replaced more than a month ago by the snap of early fall. And
it was beautiful, wasn’t it? All
those trees, setting fire to the mountains like they’d been waiting all season
to do just that? The tart juice of a just-picked apple, sharp and delicious on
your tongue? The warmth of sliding into a sweater again, for the first time in
months?
Beautiful.
But now, it’s November. Now, the bright colors and the
newness of the season are gone, and when the evenings come early, the last of
the sunlight is fractured as it sinks into a net of stark, leafless branches.
The former glory of the trees, fallen now and fading to brown, is scattered
beneath them, dry and cracked and dead.
And it’s cold again. I tug my jacket more tightly around me,
my steps wandering, following the most gnarled of the leaves just to hear them
crunch under my soles. I’m not really dressed for a walk in the woods today,
but the nature preserve is right on my way home from work, and there’s still plenty
of light left for a short walk down the trail and back. It’s long and low, that
dying golden sun, and something about the slant of its rays draw out colors
from the drab November woods that I hadn’t noticed before. How many shades of
grey are there in an oak tree’s trunk? More than I know names for, certainly.
And how had I not seen that the backs of those leaves I’d been happily stepping
on a moment ago aren’t bronze like their fronts, but silver-white?
I turn to leave, walking slow with eyes wide. This subtle
loveliness is so easy to miss after the vibrancy and exuberance of October, and
while I remember the cold of this time of year, I seem to have forgotten it’s
beauty. My mind tends to jump from one obvious grace to the next: the moment
that first burst of fall color begins to fade, I’m already looking ahead to
those falling snow-kisses, their elegance piling up and covering the dark
branches of the trees.
But I shouldn’t. There’s a beauty here I’m missing out on if
I charge blithely on. I reach the edge of the woods and pause, looking back
through the trees, and maybe I’m seeing them—really seeing them—for the first
time. In the spring, the hinting green buds lend them an air of promise, and in
the summer, they hide behind the bright green of healthy growth. Early fall is
maybe their best moment, when they light their leaves up and burn, but what
now? What now, when there are no buds or leaves or even snow, just the
slender trunks crowned by interlaced branches?
They are stripped bare, and I can see the shades of
color—white and black, grey and silver, brown and bronze— varying from tree to
tree. I can see every knot, every snapped-off branch, every crack breaking in
deep through the bark. I can see the graceful arc of branches lifted to the
purpling sky above them, like raised hands. Like they’re shrugging quietly,
“This is all I am. Can you call this beautiful?”
My breath catches.
I walk back just a few steps and press my hand against the
craggy bark of the nearest tree: an oak. I look up, into the lacy web of
branches high above my head, and I do: I see the beautiful here, in this
imperfect tree gripping the earth and reaching for the sunset sky. In this
November woods. In this almost-gone day. And as I do, I realize that this is
something I want to remember. Not the cold of this season, or the glory of
other seasons. Just this.
Because it is beautiful.
