I sit at my desk, an old pastry table with an enamel top. Luka and Annie, the two little brown dogs, are asleep, one at my feet, one behind my back in the chair. I look out the window onto our gray and white valley carved by a small, meandering tributary of the Ompompanoosuc and begin to consider the melting, greening and scents that will arrive with spring.
The afternoon hike we take reminds me that the colors of northern Februarys are not completely absent, they are just hiding under a gray sky and, like many objects of beauty, take some work to find.
Cornus sericea, red osier dogwood, crosshatches the brushy riverbanks while mushy red-brown apples decorate Malus pumila branches, falling in a good wind to feed the hungry. Goldenrods with swollen stems (homes for gall fly larvae, Eurosta solidaginis), add pale ocher to the mix, and wild, tall grasses, a bit of yellow. Cursed Japanese knotweed spices up the riverbank with meandering walls of orange. Bright, fuzzy red berries of staghorn sumac are one of the last fruits to be eaten for all their bitterness and lack of lipids.
Sometimes science gives us words that roll off the tongue so nicely they are fun to say. “Marcescence” is one of those. It refers to plant parts that wither yet persist, like the leaves of oak or beech trees that may have evolved in the south, where they did not need to shed leaves in the winter. My mnemonic for remembering is “marsupial persistence.” Orange marcescent beech and oak leaves will flutter throughout the forest all winter long. One might say Sen. Elizabeth Warren is marcescent for “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
This may be the only time of year when conifers can be counted on to show the many nuances of green.
White pine, Pinus strobus, is ever so slightly yellow. Balsam fir, Abies balsamea, towers skinny, dark and somewhat ominous as spires in the forest. Eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, soft and shaggy, red and green, standing up yet bending over, seems to say, “I just can’t figure out who to be.” Spruces are sharp and pokey, and sometime smelly like cat pee. Firs are flat, soft and friendly, smelling like citrus, with white stomata on the backs of leaves for breathing. White pine needles cluster in fives, red pines in twos, pitch pines in threes.
Winter is a quiet time, with no cacophonies of birdsong or frog calls to distract us from seeing. Perhaps that is why those little bits of color pop out so. Or maybe we look more intensely when there is less to see, and everything is surrounded by white.
Dare I tempt the gods and think about spring already? If we did not engage in some excitement for spring, we might just wallow in the gray of failed impeachment hearings and the despair of climate predictions.
When things seem to be spiraling down, little bits of joy and splashes of color can sustain us to keep doing the work we need to do to make things better.
Micki Colbeck, of Strafford, is an artist, a conservation biologist and a member of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.