snapshot (noun): an informal photograph taken quickly; one that captures a small moment out of a string of moments that are maybe bigger or brighter or flashier, but one that you want to remember anyway, if only because it is beautiful, somehow, in its smallness

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.