Notes from my Knapsack 2-14-19

Notes from my Knapsack 2-14-19

Jeff Gill

 

Not our best look

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It's understood that the latter half of winter is not Ohio's best look.

 

Filthy piles of melting snow, crystalized and refrozen around revealed trash and debris, scattered in between the soggy yellow-green patches of grass. Soil mostly mud around the edges where we're often having to step, not always in waterproof boots, grit and salt tracked into our homes and stores and churches, a fading trail of filth that custodians struggle to keep up with.

 

Trees are starting to crack and split, a few sagging over as the ground releases its hold on root balls with the deep saturation. The wet bark is a slimy sort of black and one tree can barely be told from another, just a handful of upright splinters against a grey backdrop.

 

What I'd encourage you to remember during our slow return to longer days, brighter hopes, and more stable soil underfoot, is that the look of the natural world right now is kind of like someone finishing a stretch at the gym, or a runner completing their day's training, or a laborer heading home after a rough day at the salt mine. That's when you might look sweaty and bedraggled and haggard, but the hard work is done. The benefits are yet to be repaid, in muscle tone or endurance or just the pay check, but it had to be completed for the payoff to come in.

 

Winter, hard winter, is just that for the landscape. Dead branches are fallen, weaker tree structures revealed, leaves are mulching into the soil if they weren't mown over before, and beneath the surface, below the dreadful looking turf, worms and bugs and stirring rootlets are stirring the earthy pot.

 

Hibernation for some animals, migration for others, means a turnover in the fauna as well as the flora, and while we've come into a time with climate change where robins are here year round and even great blue herons can be seen in January, beating their slow steady way across the valley below, soon we will have the smaller birds making their way north.

 

Within those grim ghostly trees, the warmth of a higher sun angle, let alone more hours of its light, are drawing up from the roots the sap, which is beginning a process that will feed the inner life of those woods and to each branch spur the buds to become leaves . . . and a bit of it will be diverted by local syrup makers in the next few weeks, tap by tap, bucket by bucket, heading for the kettles to boil down to the sweetness meant to feed the canopy, used by us for our blessed pancakes.

 

It's not a pretty time, but there's as much going on in nature right now as was true back in July or will be this June. The life of the world is hidden in plain sight, and ready to burst out. When you slow down to notice the signs of this enlivening energy at work, it makes the grey gravelly days of February a good bit more tolerable, and even encouraging.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him where you see signs of pre-spring at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.