January light

At the cabin, shadows are getting long at 4:00 on this January afternoon.  We walk with the dog towards the large flat rock that is a favorite. 

Here we can stand on a broad, red granite slab edged with lichen, and look west towards a distant mountain range that can be seen through a V in the canyon.  We watch the sun scale slowly down into the trees, the glare splayed like sharp spokes of light through the broad branches of Ponderosa. 

I think of Madeleine L’Engle and her star-gazing rock.  There, secrets of the cosmos poke into everyday life, as if the rock were centered under a hole in the rachia, the great solid, perforated dome that formed the primeval sky of Genesis.  Strange truth drips on the rock like rain.

Each year I wonder if I will survive winter, with its frugal light and dust-brown horizon.  I grieve the hibernation of photosynthesis, the absence of green foliage that feathers the landscape and softens harsh corners, green that feeds the world.  I have tried to train myself to the practice of winter, to embrace the bare and the cold, to find beauty in graceful skeletons of aspens and the changeable contours of ice.  It feels like Lent without sweets, or music. 

This January has been better than most.  The several warm days, rare with cordial temperatures, have melted the snow drifts and lure us outside.  Returning from the broad watching-rock, we hike in sneakers rather than boots, without jackets.  Piles of boulders and fallen soldiers of dead trees darken as the day’s light retreats.  Our jagged shadows as we walk eastward are three times our height.  There is a sense we can never live up to them. 

On my left, the grass is illumined in a slice of light.  The waning light catches wheaten stalks, all the way to the base, and highlights every reedy strand.  Grass seeds and panicles glow at the tops of their stalks, each feathery shape picked out clearly like a nimbus or corona.  I turn to look west, and see a field of grasses detailed in their moment of shining, like a delicate blond beard against the rocks.  

What has always been dismissed as “just grass,” a homogeneous green that tickles at knee-level, now becomes a display of diversity.  The grass is not one, but many.  I snap off representative heads of grasses that are curled like the dense tail of a Husky, or sturdy and clutched like grain, or lacy and spread with tiny dill-like seeds. 

Ann Zwinger’s sketches tell us we have seen bluegrass, smooth brome, pine dropseed, and slender wheat-grass.   They have escaped the usual crush of snow.  

 

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner thing happens, the resurge of nature.   - Edna O’Brien

Wings

At the cabin, it’s finally summer.  Aspens have leafed out, filling the glen with quaking clusters of caterpillar green, a bright shade seen only in montane spring.  My mother follows me as we cross the stream, heading towards the bench set in the rustling aspen grove.  She bends nearly in half as she walks, stopping to examine mysterious new sprigs of bushes and wildflowers.  “A wild rose…” she says.  “And potentilla.  Is that…”  I smile vaguely, because I can’t identify much without a field guide. 

We settle on the bench, which invites us to look up, at pines and aspens that reach tall for the sun on the south-facing slope, along the narrow, flat clearing that adjoins the stream.  Or technically, the crick.  The stream runs seasonally, and seems dry now, though there must be water seeping under the litter of decayed leaves and pine needles, fed by small springs upstream.  Evidence of water surrounds us – green grasses stretching tall, tiny clumps of moss clinging to aspen starts, midges and mysterious insects that nibble at uncovered skin.  This is precious habitat in a semi-arid land of decomposing pink granite.  

 “Are there chiggers?”  my mother asks.  If there are, they’ll find me.  I’m particularly tasty to chiggers. 

 At bedtime in the mountains I’m reading Beyond the Aspen Grove by Colorado naturalist Ann Zwinger.  She tells me about the insects and fauna I’m missing while I sit on the deck and watch clouds, or stare at treetops, rather than look into a microscope and draw what I see.  Zwinger’s book describes years spent exploring her family’s land 40 acres north of Woodland Park, called “Constant Friendship”, after an ancestral home from the 1700s.  The cabin sits at nearly the same altitude as Constant Friendship, perhaps 30 miles away.   

Years ago I attended a Poetry West meeting led by Zwinger, where she handed out blank postcards printed with her plant illustrations.  She led a workshop on “postcard poems,” pieces short enough to be penned on a card.  I scribbled iffy stanzas in my notebook, and quietly stashed the blank cards in my copy of Beyond the Aspen Grove, purchased used from the Aspen Leaf Bookshop run by a friend.  I would read sections of the book, and long for the day when I might observe a mountain land as closely as Zwinger had.  With that book, I could carry a dream in my hands. 

At the end of the meeting, Zwinger signed my copy:  “A sense of place is what ties us to home…Beyond the Aspen Grove is where I’ve found such a place.” 

My family eats lunch on the large deck.  One end of the deck is marked with caution tape while the deck’s precarious steps are moved and rebuilt.  The east deck drops abruptly into space, like a third-storey door opening to nowhere in an Albert Campion novel. 

My mother says, “Is that an eagle?”  A dark raptor with a white cap makes a lazy circuit over the hilltop across from us. Perhaps he is eyeing the burgers and peach cobbler on our plates. I’ve seen eagles here only when my mother visits.  As the eagle heads downstream, I see the lift of his wing structure, shaped like a longhorn steer, as he sails just over the tops pine trees. 

Not long after, I point out a spectacular red-tailed hawk follows a similar circuit, cutting a circle over the aspens and then continuing west.  The hawk’s wingspan seems particularly broad from this close vantage–7 feet? Perhaps it’s a female hawk, which can be a third larger than a male.  The sun straight overhead shines through her feathers, making wings and tail glow a translucent, rusty red as she banks into the light.  She is the color of red granite lit and soaring. Her wings are flat and fringed with black as she flies west.