The trees are dancing, swaying, sometimes frenetically when
the wind gusts. Leaves swirl up and up
in mounting spirals until the wind pauses. Then they spiral back down only to
be flung into the neighbor’s yard in the next breath. Today’s wind is a cold
November wind, the fierce, hurrying kind that sweeps out of the north, gnashing
its teeth and shouting. It’s doing its
best to chase summer from the landscape, to make us dig out sweaters and wooly
socks, turn up the heat and hunker down.
Seasonal changes
don’t come without a fight. There’s a casual letting go at first with only hints
of what’s to come. Warm air is tinged with coolness overnight, leaves lose
chlorophyll and show their true colors, and for a while there’s a bridge, a
connecting season, a resting, breathing space before the first blast of
dedicated winter.
When it comes, that frigid breath, it takes no prisoners. Today’s
wind is a harbinger of such change. It speaks of ice and snow and bitter cold,
of leafless branches sketched in ink against a bleak sky, of chill silence and
early darkness. There is redemptive beauty in the harshness, however. It’s
there in every snowflake, in the bright dance of hearth flames, in the diamond
sparkle of sunshine on snow, in the scarlet flash of a cardinal’s wing or the
stark radiance of the frosty moon.
