February’s end.
It seems odd, somehow, that the last day of a month should fall on a Monday, a seeming contradiction between endings and beginnings. That’s only true, of course, according to colonial measures; our ways of reckoning season and time are much different.
But this month is ending in fine form, too, if not precisely in the way we need: a thin veil of pearl-gray clouds and air almost impossibly mild. It’s a beautiful day to be out of doors, but it’s not the weather the land needs for late winter.
Still, we’ve been blessed with the slow melt of the snow from recent storms, and that is more than we thought we would have by now. For now, at least, the heavy weather of late winter is only a memory, if not a particularly distant one.
The featured image in this week’s photo meditation is one from a time when real winter was measured here in snow by the foot. I’ve traditionally used this photo in a February post, mostly because I’ve always associated it with this month. I’d be hard pressed to explain why to anyone but Wings, but it has to do with the level of snow on the ground and the slopes and the angle of the light: just enough time for one early thaw before the next wave of weather arrives.
Wings shot this one on film, some sixteen years ago, perhaps a little more. I can date it to that range with some assurance, since I was the one who digitized it, but another tell is the presence of the old sentinels in the foreground. And that was, in fact, its name: Sentinels.
They’re all gone now, save a couple of broken trunks. As climate change tightened its group, now more than a decade ago, the fierce spring winds here became something else entirely. They took out these old warriors, plus another four a little further to the west in this same expanse of fields.
These were felled first, and the day I saw it, I wept. It was as though an essential piece of this place, its old spirits, were gone.
But our ways tell us otherwise, and I should have had more faith.
That year or the next, a ditch fire — once normal preparation for spring irrigation; not so normal, or even possible, anymore with the trickster winds of climate change continually upon us — got out of hand, racing across the dry and dormant grass. It was quite the spectacle, emergency vehicles down in the field, people milling around frantically. It was put out, of course, but the flames had found their way to this cluster of dead trunks and stumps. blackening the tallest remaining segment and scorching the grass and limbs all around it.
A year later, driving past, we saw new green leaves reaching out from the ancient wood.
There’s nothing miraculous about it, of course; fire cleanses and rebirths just as water does.
Our world is wounded, but it is also stronger than we know.
That strength is manifest in the elemental force of winter, but also in what follows: in the thaw, resilience, and an earth reborn and ready to grow.
As we wind down the shortest month of the year and look to the new moon of March, it’s a good lesson to keep firmly in mind. Our world may not look as it did only a few short years ago, but it is alive and capable of prospering still.
We just have to do the work.
~ Aji
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