One day last week, this densely wooded landscape was a myriad tangle of pencil lines drawn against a snowy white background, and it was difficult to tell which had come first: The light or the dark.
In the art world, there exists a concept known as chiaroscuro, wherein light and dark surfaces are overlapped in such a way that it is impossible to tell which is dominant. Was the light applied to the dark, or vice versa?
Had I not known any better, it would have been impossible to tell that day that the trees, of course, had been there first, and the snow had merely been applied to their branches leaving just enough bark exposed in such a way that it seemed like someone had outlined each one in smudgy charcoal pencil. But as is her wont to do, nature soon erased her work, turning her canvas upside down and shaking it gently back to reality.
The vernal pool was also particularly breathtaking and as enticingly hypnotic as a woodland scene in a children’s book. The wet snow had created a canopied enclosure around heavily laden tree branches, white-capped rocks and a semi-frozen base of metallic gray water. At any moment, I fully expected to see wild creatures gathering on its banks or fluttering from tree to tree. But there was no movement aside from twigs bouncing as they released their burden of snow beneath the tops of trees through which little sky was visible.
It was the most spectacular I’d seen it here in many years following an early spring snowfall, which didn’t really qualify as a storm as much as winter’s final statement. It snowed all day, but with very little accumulation, the first of which melted immediately upon touching the warm ground. White clumps continued to fall for awhile as the air, too, warmed at the sun’s touch, and the earth began to reappear in spots almost as soon as its warmth could be felt.
How very like nature to playfully leave us with a pleasant, though fleeting, memory, as yet another winter retreats to give spring its due, the season that seems to march out a variety of meteorological performances, from mild 60-degree days to sub-freezing temperatures, and bright calm mornings that, without warning, erupt into wind-blown snow showers. Driving up South Street toward home yesterday, I saw a high, gray cloud bank ahead, and before I knew it, large soft flakes were clinging to my windshield, while a mere quarter of a mile behind me, the sun had been shining against a virtually clear blue sky.
I love the weather’s caprices, how, when seemingly bored with the calmness of it all, nature sends the treetops into a frenzy for no reason at all, sending dried oak leaves skittering across what’s left of the snow cover. While the weather experts would be ready with their computations and explanations of air masses and cold fronts, I just like knowing there are indeed forces greater than myself that remind me regularly of that fact in often spectacular ways.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.
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