It happened yesterday: that moment when the very Earth herself turns over; when, irrespective of human methods of counting the days, she sheds her blanket of winter neutrals and trades it for one whose primary color is bright green.
It’s an annual event, this day. Tiny green shoots have been reaching up from the soil’s surface for a while, and the buds have long since studded the branches of the trees, but they are still mere accents — browns and grays dominate. And then, one morning, the green overtakes sand and soil, branch and bark alike. And while it’ll be a while yet before the trees’ buds open into softly fluttering leaves — that’s an event that historically seems to be reserved for Easter, no matter when on the calendar it falls — yesterday’s change of hue is a clear sign that spring is solidly here.
It’s not always evident, of course; like everything in life, it depends, at least in part, on the angle from which you view it. Today is bright and sunny, but they tell us rain is one the way later in the week — and, indeed, the signs are already gathering around the edges of our field of vision, like the clouds slowly emerging from what as yet appears no more than haze around the horizon. The willows remain gold, not green, their drooping branches a maize-colored waterfall, a diamond-edged screen in warm metallic hues. The cottonwoods are yet more gray than even gold, and down along the banks of the Quartzite, their great trunks long stripped of bark by wind and weather resemble the great bodies of an unusual species of elephant stretching skyward toward a sun that hides its face.
Unlike these great spirits shown here, ours have no lacy tatwork of leaves atop them yet; still in bud stage,their upper reaches have flowered only into bright copper thus far. Their own green will come later, although perhaps not as late as last year: The images you see here today were captured last May, following an April that brought more snow than all of last winter combined.
Then, too, we had more clouds than usual for the time of year, a pattern repeating itself now: thunderheads more reminiscent of late-summer monsoonal afternoons than of early spring days, and skies awash in shades of iron and pewter and dove gray that take me back to the lands and springs of my childhood, a climate far different from this. We had no cottonwoods there; our great trees were oak and maple, birch and cedar, and the stands of great soldier pines, old warriors, in the middle of the state. Yet these riverside trees, mostly bare of their bark robes, nonetheless remind me of them: Ancient sentinels, battered by sun and storms and heavy winds and the sheer passage of time, still standing strong and silent and ever resolute . . . and still flowering against all elements and odds, still growing, still alive.
Even among those whose spirits have since departed there remains a stark and powerful beauty. They add to the life that surrounds them even as their own lives have ended and they have exchanged their seasonal green for a permanent silver-gray. They continue to feed and house creatures of the river’s ecosystem, to support the lives of their clansmen, trees and shrubs and flowering plants. They provide a perch for the pairs of eagles who happen by on their migratory paths, watchtowers from which to identify food and foe alike. And they continue to give to the beauty of this place, a place of harsh elemental powers, of difficult passage and prickly demeanor.
And sometimes, what seems to be lifeless is in fact merely at temporary rest: Days, weeks, months, even years pass, and then a tiny branch at the end of one of the great gray arms sprouts a bud, then two, then dozens, then leafs out into bright green sprigs that dance on the winds.
Tomorrow, colorful motifs will overtake the winds of the dominant culture, as it celebrates a long-departed saint of a particular European tradition by painting everything in shades of kelly green. For us, tomorrow is simply another day, but it is a day when spring has come early, and we can work outside in a world itself once again engaged in the wearing of the green.
~ Aji
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