THANK YOU, LEAF!

Thank you, leaf.

Thank you for your one thread in the tapestry of a hundred greens that forms the backdrop of my every summer glance;

For being my breath’s inverse, exhaling exactly what I need, inhaling what I don’t;

For your microcosmic demonstration of how watersheds feed rivers...though in reverse;

For helping cleanse the mess we make of air and soil;

For your voice in the whispered chorus stirred by wind…and for dancing to the music;

                          

For laying one tile in a living roof that shelters a community, from bacteria to bugs, to bears, to beings;

For thriving on the very rays that would hurt me, for shade that cools whole forests and neighborhoods;

For nourishing my hungry eyes with works of color, form, texture and pattern;

For your showy translucence that begged me to make lampshades of you;

For your gracious surrender to winter, your spent crisps falling to blanket yards and delight young hearts;

For your elegant testament to the inevitable cycle of life, fed by, then feeding the soil beneath your feet;

For teaching me that this promise of renewal is more real than many folks’ futile hope for permanence;

For all these gifts—and those of your earthly kin—three-hundred quadrillion* thank yous, leaf!

* Three-hundred quadrillion (300,000,000,000,000,000): the approximate number of leaves on all our planet's trees—based on the journal Science's estimate of three trillion trees, and using half of Quora's estimate of 200,000 leaves per mature tree.

SHADES OF SHADE

 
A fascinating array of color and life forms inhabit this old windfall. Gnarly white bracket fungus oozes out of dark bark recesses...then doesn’t quite know what to do without a vertical surface on which to cantilever.

Emerald moss seeks out a bit more light on surfaces in brighter shade. And blue-green and gold lichen—a composite, symbiotic organism comprising both a fungus and moss’s more primitive cousin, an alga—likely took up residence here before either of its neighbors.

It is a study, too, of endurance. Fungi and mosses, surviving deep Minnesota winters, can live for years. Lichen, given a more durable substrate than this bark—which is being devoured by the fungus—can easily grow for centuries.

BLUE-SKY BLIZZARD – Awash in Wintery Wonder

This morning in the forest every branch and twig seems more slender for the epaulet of fresh snow atop its shoulders. The fine lines of dark taupe and raw umber branch and spread, etched in a Maya blue sky. Crisp post-Alberta-clipper
air hovers, breathless, at around zero.

PHOTO: MichiganMoments.com

I swear I can hear tiny creaks and clanks, whispers of those the hot water pipes in old buildings make, as still-rising sun heats the branches. Though nothing will course through them for another month and a half, there is movement. Imperceptibly, the rough, warm bark swells. Dampened by the first drops of snow melt, it exhales tiny wisps of steam.

Those slight, rising air currents merge and grow, and soon stir the branches. To my right, a few falling flakes catch glints of sun; then more to my left.

      The five-year-old in me opens his mouth and 
      catches as much as he can on his tongue.

PHOTO: Lee Rentz

I stand among trunks in a pool of sunlight. An inkling lifts my gaze, and suddenly I’m awash in a fine, dazzling-diamond mist. The five-year-old in me opens his mouth and catches as much as he can on his tongue. Though too little to even wet it, the snowy spritz quenches my grateful soul. And then, but for a few straggling flakes, it is gone.

I look to position myself under another snow shower, but the game of wonder whac-a-mole frustrates me. I guess the one prize will have to do…for now.

HOARFROST MORNING – A Study In White

Heading up to Bemidji, in north central Minnesota near the headwaters of the Mississippi, is always a nice drive. Up there, it’s a mix of pine, birch and aspen forest, the occasional open field and, of course, our state’s ubiquitous lakes.

Winter applies its own kind of beauty, stripping most trees of foliage and blanketing both land and lake in snow. It’s a challenge to find any color but shades of gray and white.

        It is a weightless, translucent white 
        not dumped from above as much as  
        breathed onto the landscape.

To the thirsty eye, though, there are, indeed, sips of colors to be found. Raw umber and burnt sienna oak leaves unable to let go their attachment to summer. The vividly lacquered bark of dogwood and other small, bare shrub stems striating snowy fields in airy patches of gold, burgundy, crimson, rust and even chartreuse. The quick, crimson check mark of a flitting cardinal.

CATCHING WINTER’S BREATH
But this time the drive home is different. Not for a coming out of those grudging colors, but for their further retreat. Today they are even more muted, everywhere veiled in white. And not the solid, hefty kind laid on by snow, but the weightless, translucent white of hoarfrost—a coating not dumped from above as much as breathed onto the landscape.
 

The pines seem to wear the sheer medium most elegantly. Each tuft of needles is rendered rounder, fuller, by frost’s airbrushed highlights. Pure dazzling white on one side wraps to light pastel green on the other. The clumps huddle as boughs, set off against the deep recesses between, places beyond reach of white.

                Birches, without the weight 
                of dark trunks to hold them 
                down, seem to hover...

While the pines seem sculpted, other bare, willowy trees are sketched in fine line. The crowns are consumed in luminous white; the trunks still black but for the frosted windward edges.

And the birches; without the weight of dark trunks to hold them down they seem
to hover, from base to branch a subtle fusion of white on white.

FROM MAGIC TO MYSTICAL
All the while, occasional leaks of sunlight pierce the mottled gray sky, their pools of light slowly sweeping like spotlights across this magical treescape. They turn up what already seems pure white to a brilliance one would think impossible if not lit from within.

Just as we’re thinking it couldn’t get any more glorious, specks of white seem to lift out of the treetops into the gray clouds. First there are a few; then dozens, rising, coming toward us. As they get closer we realize they are trumpeter swans, perhaps just taking off from nearby Itasca State Park.

The birds are huge and, as if intended to be the finale of our wintery wonders show, pure white except for black eyes, bills and feet. We watch the tandem of graceful, paired wingbeats pulse from each bird’s body to its wingtips in perfect mirror-image waves. The swans keep coming, right over us, in groups of five to fifty, for ten minutes.

We are left in awe, speechless.