Field Notes—

Ever Green Through

The Dark And Cold

By Curtiss Clark

The swell of darkness that delivers us to the winter solstice comes also to cover the woodlands, where hardwoods in a brash display of immodesty now stand with their deciduous apparel around their ankles. We can still see in the dim slant of December light that the trees are beautiful in their nakedness, and despite my profound respect for the dignity of trees, I cannot look away.

There are spaces in the woods now. Spaces for light, as weak as it may be. Spaces for snow to sift through, confounding those looking at the resulting tracery. (Is it the white or black that is the true substance of this woodland lace?) Spaces for blackbirds to migrate back and forth between existence and nonexistence like the dreams of a nodding reader of this cold, cold calligraphy.

And now on the exposed body of the forest floor we can see evidence of  the long relationship of this land with those who would dare to make a living on it. Stone walls bulge out of the ground like the veins on the arms of those who built them 200 years ago under the spell of a timeless mantra: one stone over two; two stones over one.

The stones press down on each other with the same steady force that wore out those original wall workers day after day as they struggled with New England’s limitless capacity to fetch new stones up from the depths of its rocky prehistory. If I were to lift one now, I would feel that same continuous force pressing through my body to the ground — an unbroken link to those sweaty ghosts of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

The woodlands are full of reminders of life left behind, from insect exoskeletons to these great linear monuments in stone. But here and there are evergreen islands — Christmas ferns, the stray hemlock or yew, a creaking stand of spruce trees, and susurrous white pines — to remind us that even in the dead of winter, the natural world leans away from death toward rebirth and new life. It is no wonder that the pagan solstice custom of bringing evergreens indoors became an enduring tradition associated with the life-affirming Christmas story.

So, with wreaths on the house and the barns, a spruce sapling propped up and lit in the well house, and a Frasier fir wrestled into a cramped corner by a bookcase safely across the room from the woodstove, Kate and I are now ready to take our pruning shears to the woods in search of aromatic greens for the fireplace mantels and shelves.  We literally want to spruce up the house for Christmas.

But each year, as we walk through the beauty of  New England’s newly naked woods on this quest, it occurs to us that the perfect setting for these lush green emblems of life’s persistence is right where they stand, watching over the woods, linking past and future lives.

(More than 70 essays in the Field Notes series by Curtiss Clark can be found at www.field-notebook.com.)