Maybe it’s the Red Tide. Maybe it’s the shade. Or maybe it’s just my frame of mind. But for some reason I’m taking walks off the beach-beaten track this year. And I’m finding …
Spanish moss …
lush greenery,
and quiet canals.
All just steps away from the sand and surf.
You’d think writing several posts about the Brood X cicadas would have been enough.
I described how I felt sorry for them and their short lives. Then I wrote about how they inspired me to want to “seize the day.” Finally, I noted their departure..
What I haven’t yet described is what they left behind: the brown branches hanging from cherry, gum and oak. The crinkly brown tips that fall off and litter the yard.
Known as flagging — since the limp branches wave in the wind like so many sad little flags — the condition is not serious, I hear. Trees affected with this look sicker than they are, gardening experts say.
But for folks in my neighborhood, who are quite used to 100-foot oaks toppling over in a storm or breeze, any sign of sylvan distress is taken seriously.
Walking the other day, noticing the damage and thinking about a name for it, I came up with “brown-edged,” which reminds me of a cookie, the brown-edged wafer, popular in my youth.
Though a brown-edged tree looks nothing like a cookie, somehow that makes it easier to take.
A wild wind blew in from the west yesterday, bending the bamboo and sending Kwanzan cherry petals flying over grass and street.
It was a veritable petal storm, as the wind continued through the night and into today, sending overnight temperatures below freezing and forcing us to bring in the few plants we’d set outside.
I’m telling myself that it’s only a temporary retreat. Spring is on the march this Earth Day, and it will persevere in the end. Until then, I’m watching the petals as they fly. At least they’re not snowflakes.
Every year I obsess over a new type of spring bloom. This year, it’s the redbud tree. I’ve admired them forever, of course. On the long drives to Kentucky I would see wild ones blooming in the mountains, sometimes whole swatches of them coloring the hillsides.
Unlike the delicate cherries of early spring, the redbud is vibrant, bold — an azalea-hued plant that doesn’t wait till late April to show its bright color.
I’ve photographed several of them lately and covet one for the yard. I have just the spot for it.
Most days I have little choice about which walk I take. I have 30 or so spare minutes, and I sandwich in a stroll between meetings and deadlines, taking the most expedient route — the one out my front door, down the main drag in the neighborhood and back.
But yesterday, I had a little more time, so I picked a paved path that runs along the Fairfax County Parkway because it afforded the best view of blooming Bradford Pear and Redbud trees. I’d been seeing white petals blowing in the breeze like so many springtime snowflakes, and I figured if I was going to see the pears, I’d better do it soon.
The parkway path provided a broad-stroke, Impressionistic view of spring, the kind seen from a distance. It made me feel as if I had traveled far, when actually I was only a few miles from home.
The men who climb trees were here last week, and they left our oaks and gum and hollies tidy and pruned and shorn.
It was a long-overdue task, given the branches that were hanging over the house and scraping the garage. But it leaves me feeling bare and exposed and doubtful of the shade we’ll have this spring and summer.
It’s all part of growth and renewal, removing the deadwood, but it reminds me too much of the way life is now: cutting back to the quick, to the most essential, learning how much we can do without.
Which is why I’m hoping that the haircuts the trees received leave them with thicker and more elegant tresses come summer.
A glimpse of winter sky through a tangle of arching branches might first bring thoughts of winter’s starkness and simplicity.
But a closer look reveals that these limbs are full of life. Soon, the sap will start to flow up from the ground through the trunk and into the twigs, where it will nourish the new leaves once they bud.
Even in the dormant season, though, the branches offer rest and recharging, a perch. I’ve been watching the black gum tree, observing how birds alight on its limbs while awaiting their turn at the feeder or suet block.
They are mostly patient, these birds. They will sit still as statues until there’s an opening, then they will swoop in and gobble up the seed or suet.
I snapped a photo of two birds this morning. They are barely discernible amid the long black fingers of the gum tree. But they are there, biding their time.
As seasons pass, dimensions change and distances shrink. The greenery that hemmed us in only last month has thinned and drooped. Leaves have shriveled and blown away. What was once a screen is now an open book.
We hear about winter light, the low-slanting sun, but not as much about winter sight.
My woods walks lately reveal shiny new objects: small metal discs hammered into tree bark. Some trees have been tagged recently because the metal gleams and the discs swing freely on their nails. The older discs have dimmed and dulled; some you can hardly see because they have been swallowed up by bark. The trees have grown around them. Eventually those markers will seem little more than a metal eye.
While these older markers have been there all along, I saw them as if for the first time over the weekend. It was the winter landscape that drew my eyes to them, the same bare expanse that lets us glimpse a hidden stream or the outline of a hill, once shrouded in green. It is winter sight.
I borrow this term from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in “Spring and Fall to a Young Child,” wrote of Goldengrove unleaving and of “worlds of wanwood [that] leafmeal lie.”
Here is my leaf meal — what is left of the Kwanzan cherry’s foliage, which disappeared in a day.
I shivered when I saw it, and not just from the chill wind that followed the rain (and which, paired with the rain, brought down the leaves).
I shivered because looking at that bare trunk I felt winter in my face — and the single-mindedness of seasonal change.