Morning revealed the night work of nature’s ice artist while oak leaves shimmered in the glow of sunrise. I thought about March, the month already half over, how we always seem to wish it would just end. Wish it were April.
But March is more than a bridge between winter and spring. We may have to look for its allure, but it does offer more than shrinking snowbanks and rising temperatures. I looked where yesterday’s puddle of melt had turned to ice overnight. Imagine, nature crystalized this piece for my brief enjoyment. In only a matter of hours it would puddle again under the sun’s growing power.
On this small, hard canvas was ice as smooth as a mirror reflecting the sky, and also ice textured and feathered like a bird’s wingtips. There were delicate shelves of ice, swirls (cat-ice), and wandering wavy lines, like chimney smoke on a calm morning. I stared at the icy creation, seeing a fallen bird, the eyes of a ghost’s upside-down face, and the geographic form of the Red Sea between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
This intricate piece—one of a kind sculpted in darkness—would soon be water again, its artist in hiding, planning tonight’s design.
I returned to my coffee, where through a breezeway window my eye caught a kitchen window reflecting the morning. The glass was filled with rust-brown oak leaves—a mirrored, blurred image with a blue-sky background. Any slight movement of my head shifted the image. It was fluid, not frozen, a rolling scene of leaves preferring to move sideways, not fall.
Not yet, not in March. For March, despite home of the vernal equinox, is more winter than spring. Oak leaves hang on to winter’s very end, as do we. The leaves tumble in spring, as we fall head over heels for the season of rebirth.
Oaks, like the beeches, retain their dead leaves in what botanists call marcescence—the retention of dead plant matter. Why? There are theories, only theories stress some, since nature can be coy regarding its ways. Perhaps a spring leaf drop delivers fresh organic matter to the soil under the tree. Perhaps leaf retention protects the tiny buds that formed last fall and now wait to swell in spring, pushing off their winter protector.
But why only oaks and beeches? May it be these species are still evolving into fully deciduous trees from their evergreen roots? Yes, the beech family also includes some evergreens, whose winter needles provide us with greenness when we most need color.
We wait for spring warmth and the color palette it awakens. New life all around us, new life within us, while oak leaves colored and dried last fall wait for their demise. They make their last stand, above puddles that form and freeze, thaw and refreeze, in a month that moves us along in a frustrating tease.
April will have its own agenda—showers that puddle and not freeze, tree buds swelling into tiny leaves—while icy artwork and spent leaves are swept away in streams of spring.
Note: For more essays like this, my book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available by contacting me at davegreschner@icloud.com or 715-651-1638. The book is also available through online book sellers, and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tale), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwinds), Three Lakes (Mind Chimes), Cable (Redbery Books),and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and in Duluth, Minn., at The Bookstore at Fitger’s.