Seasons

“Sometimes from down below

I catch the flash of the stream’s flow.

Sometimes I sit like a stone on the cliff.

My heart is like the orphan cloud,

With nothing to lean on,

So far, so far away,

what of the world’s could sway it?

 

Han Shan, Cold Mountain

 

January. The lush greens of last summer are dead and brown everywhere around me. The grasses that tickled my toes are damp mulch along the edge of the loch. A pale and twisted birch, lichen crusted, hangs over the waters. Its branches are witch-fingered, but the sprays sway in the breeze like a maiden’s skirts.

This is the loch where I sat and watched the summer thunderstorm batter the air and water. The rock where I sat and wore two footprints into the soil is now covered with water. The thistle that grew down by the edge of the water is drowned, dead and submerged, but I know it’s there. I walk among memories of warmth and sunshine, trying to bring it all back to life in my mind. A trillion points of detail. The glow of the sun on the back of grass blades. The fluffy sky full of cotton clouds and the scent of summer rain.

As autumn came to an end last year, I walked this very same path through the birch woods by the loch. I’d not slept well, because I was so excited about the prospect of being there when I woke. The mist rose off the loch, the movement of vapour almost indiscernible. The air was so incredibly still, thick with the creamy moisture. The water was a perfect mirror, smoking gently as ghostly water spirits took to the air.

 

The birches were at the peak of their autumn leaf, then. Bejewelled from skirt to crown, shapely towers of white and gold. A layer of frost picked out every edge in silver. The sun rose into the air and shined with that most golden quality that can only be found at dawn. When I was finished sitting beside the loch I started to walk home through the woods, the air now clearing and full of radiant sunshine. 

 

It started in ones and twos, unnoticeable at first. A golden flutter of motion, down through the trunks. Another, and another. You see where this is going. I became aware of it at last because of the noise. It sounded like rain, but was not. It was a shower of a million birch leaves. I looked up, to where the trees converged around a blue sky, and at once several leaves landed on my face. I raised my hands to it like a beggar, and my palms were gently filled with gold from the queens of the wood.

The frost must have triggered it, part of my brain was telling me. The trees sensed the impending arrival of winter, and could not risk holding their leaves a moment longer. A thousand Cinderellas fleeing the inevitable strike of the clock. They’ve danced this long in their finest, but now it’s time to go.

The sound was astonishing. The air was still absolutely breathless, and I could hear it going on everywhere. It sounded almost exactly like the fall of heavy snow. A pattering mutter, a whisper in the ear. It was one of the most comforting, most natural, and most right noises I had ever heard. Down every avenue of trees a golden rain of leaves was falling.

Here and there a wisp of fog still drifted through the trees, vanishing where they struck sunlight. But through those shafts of misty light the birch leaves drifted in their myriads, leaving a memory of silver-yellow streaks. I fixed my eyes on a branch, and watched it become bare leaf by leaf, while the ground around me turned to gold.

It was a good memory to summon on a cold January day such as this. Those golden leaves are black now, and witchy branches scratch the air. Yet the sprays dance like maiden’s skirts, and on each one I find a tiny catkin. There is a promise that such things will come again.

But winter has its charms too, that are not found at any other time. The same birch tree by the shore, a different day, and at the tip of every twig hangs a drop of rain. Where the sprays hang above the water and sway in the breeze, a crystal chandelier breaks apart piece by piece and falls into the water below. The water is a silver mirror, cracked by the black lines of the reflected branches. The whites and blacks flow and dance into one another as the rain stipples and flecks the liquid, as mindlessly beautiful as notes falling off a piano. Every note lands, fades, disappears into the story.

 

The first heavy fall of snow finally came in early February, giving me the chance to make a winter pilgrimage to the pinewood. The snow was falling densely as we walked down across the moor and through the pines. Scout porpoised his way through a mixture of deep heather and snow, clearly enjoying himself and naturally knowing exactly where we were going. The air was thick with large blobs of snow blowing hard through the air on a stiff wind, the air as grey and blank as the snow itself.

 

As we entered the trees the whole world was reduced to stark blacks and whites. Where a thin pool of water snaked through the moor it appeared as a gaping crack in the world, full of darkness. But subtle colours – browns and greens – peered out from under thick eyebrows of accumulated snow that hung heavy on every pine branch. Back and forth those branches swayed in the wind. They never seemed to move in unison – each one always going a different way to the one beside it – so the trees seemed as if they were gently dancing together to music I could not hear.

 

I went to that same place between the dozen huge granny pines, where I liked to snooze in summer on the carpet of blaeberry, and where the roe deer pass me by without knowing they are observed. It was the same place I had pitched my tent for the first of those many nights watching the spring sunrises. From there I looked out again from beneath the branches, across the dark moor at the deeper forest beyond.

 

After a while the snow began to lessen slightly. At first just the idea of brightness appearing in the sky. A run of silver through the gun-metal clouds, twisting like a slack necklace chain. Then the faint silhouette of cone-like Carn Elrig, no more than a suggestion of something firm in the soft clouds. Suddenly the sun, or maybe only a quarter of it, spilled down and out of the clouds like water from a burst dam, helplessly and joyfully filling up the forest with light. The forest was washed in a gold brilliance that stuck to the trees like paint, and the patter of the snow became quiet.

Scout sat beside me and we looked out at it together. The forest seemed to release some tension – relaxing into the warm light that touched it. The snowstorm was sweeping past, off to dump its burden on different hills and forests. With that, it became just one more moment in the long unwritten tale of the woods; the endless string of connected moments that is going on all the time, with nothing to mark their passing. Leaves cascading in autumn, snow falling on pines, rain lashing the loch. Sunlight splitting clouds, sun delicately rising, sun elegantly setting. They all exist together in a sense. The world is a diamond, and you see a different facet every day, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t there any more. They have simply drifted a little way beyond you.