I keep circling back to a kind of primal visual experience in this column, which is my discovery of the naked winter forest as a wondrous spectacle.
Everyone talks about the leaves in fall and the flowers in spring, and almost no one talks about the branches and twigs and trunks in winter. They seem as extraordinary to me as the trees, shrubs and flowers might seem in their more obvious and celebrated kinds of beauty.
It is not just that you see for six months what lies hidden for the rest of the year, but that you can really see how intricate the structures that support the canopy actually are, how they extend down to fine capillaries of twigs, how each tree is growing towards and around its competitors for the life-giving light of the sun.
One of my current projects is trying to learn how to identify different kinds of trees in winter, from their bark. It really makes you look closely in a way that I don’t always do otherwise.