An Understatement

Winter is deeply entrenched in the forest. The landscape is bare and reveals its hills and valleys. A trail once hidden becomes exposed to be seen. Snow and Ice accumulated from a winter storm are a mask and protective layer from the unforgiving cold. Lichen, hardiest of the organisms steadfastly grows embracing the ice and the challenge to its existence. The forest is silent, each footstep is a crunch and a squeeze of sound, air pushed free from its trapping cells, pockets of air filled with pockets of water the will freeze and thaw as the season draws on.

Approaching a stream, the sound gains presence until the flow is almost loud. The snowmelt is feeding the stream and making it flow with force. This is a place of edges, ice edges, rock edges, an edge separating ridges. The force of gravity and the forces of nature pull the inanimate into the flow of the stream, giving motion to an otherwise inert object. This motion that water possesses, this flow.

Spring will soon arrive, this frost will be broken into chunks of mud and flowing streams. The undergrowth of color will emerge and the earliest and most daring pioneers of wildflowers will be the harbingers of the warming of the seasons.