Like a slow stop-motion film, this photo captures the effect of the erosion of the bank, as the weight of the trees is too much for the diminishing soil around their roots. Slowly, slowly, as the soil is washed away by high tides and wave action, the trees lean further and further, eventually falling —
There’s something about this that strikes a chord in me. The poignancy. The inevitability. The noble trees that danced in the wind, are all bound to fall.
Walking alongside Mosquito Creek this morning, and keeping a careful eye on where the dog was snoofling, my eye landed on a magnificent set of icicles dangling from a log that had fallen across the creek. Though the snow and ice were a tad treacherous, I only had my iPhone camera. To get any photos I had to get closer.
With great care, on all fours, I maneuvered down over the rocks and into the creek-bed to get close enough for a few decent shots. What a treasure of shapes and glistening light! There was a cedar tree that was newly fallen with its branches coated with thick ice, and the sun was at just the right angle to highlight the wonderful sight.
I admit to some degree of envy of the fellow who was making his way up the trail to that spot, with a proper camera on his shoulder. All day I’ve been yearning to go back. But, as is typical of these glimpses of beauty, they are fleeting. At this point the light would be too low, the creekbed in shadow. So I’m grateful for the glimpse of beauty I was given, and that I could share this little bit of it with you.
With the crisp cold and whisper of snow blessing the branches, walking in the forest trails offers constant marvels of glinting light, shape and shadow. I have been surprised that some of the deciduous bushes have held onto their leaves this late into the autumn, but its made for a lovely colourful display, combining the mellow brown, gold and umbers of autumn with the harsher realities of winter. The red berries on the bush (which I can’t identify) offer a hint of festive brilliance: a little detail mostly hidden by leaves and snow.
When we set out for our walking expedition today, to one of our favourite island spots, I had no idea I’d see it differently from any other of the many times I’d walked that trail.
The rain was falling steadily but slowed to a sort of misty drizzle by the time we hit the trail. The clouds were hanging low on the hills, draping them with varying shades of gray. The islands up the channel were a faded gray green, the water calm and so still that the rings of each raindrop was discernible til its rings blended with those around. It was all very lovely in a wintry desolate way— not a person in sight or a voice to be heard. Even the ducks were in hiding. The only wildlife we saw was a pair of otters playing on the rocks. But they too scooted away, surprised to see us, thinking perhaps the weather was providing them freedom from interlopers.
But it was the extraordinary sheen of the arbutus, its smooth bark glistening in the rain that was the greatest delight. It looked as though someone had spent hours polishing it with wax or painted it with high gloss shellac, and the effect was to show every bend and twist of the trunk and branches —each tree we came upon unique in how the years and circumstance had shaped them.
The rain’s gift was to show me those trees in a different way than I’d ever noted before. It was the detail, the strange beauty of the contortions and adaptations to weather, breakage, erosion, and all of it, beautiful— washed clean and gleaming even on such a day as this.
Bringing in the firewood on a rainy autumn day— the reward is many hours of quiet fireside warmth.
When we were kids, one of our morning chores was to fill the storage box with wood for the stove— a wonderful cast iron wood-stove. It had a smallish oven (big enough for a small turkey), and a shelf above for the pots and frypans. Each morning we'd go to the woodshed to load up the wheelbarrow, and then after pushing it across the lawn to the porch, we'd lift it out piece by piece, stack it in our arms, and traipse into the kitchen with those armloads of carefully split wood. Often we'd have to replenish the kindling supply as well. There's nothing quite as satisfying as splitting cedar rounds into wedges, then into inch wide slabs and then the plink, plink, plink, of the kindling pieces flying off and landing on the growing pile. Until I was old enough to wield the hatchet, my job was to pick up the chopped kindling and stack it neatly in the box, avoiding getting hit by flying kindling.
Hatchets, chopping blocks, cedar smell, fir sap— and wheel barrows. Good memories— memories coloured by the years, I'm sure, as I think it was harder work by far when three sticks of firewood was an armload. Now, my arms are bigger, the wheelbarrow is more 'modern' and the wood is only for the comfort and coziness of the living room, rather than for keeping the stove going to cook our food, and boil the water.
Times have changed, but the fragrance and the basic tools remain.
Its a properly wet and stormy day here today. Our only ventures out today are the necessary ones for firewood, food and dog walks.
A short while ago the rain was making such a racket thwacking the skylight above my desk that I looked up. The maple leaves from the overhanging trees have made a delightful pattern of colour and light, the rain-water squiggling the lines, and highlighting the leaves edges. I snapped the photo with my iPhone and have clarified it and adjusted it a bit so you can see something of what I saw, and am seeing. Its another example of the 'curious spectacles' the extraordinary amidst the daily round that I delight to share through this blog.
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If you want to see more photos, I'll certainly be posting more here. You can also check my Flickr page here.
As the sun lowers, the path entering the little 'quiet corner' of our garden is particularly inviting — the sunlight glowing through the leaves, and the variety of colours dappling the path itself, and one lone vibrant fuschia — It all suggests something of the beauty of the space on the other side of the small archway...
