Observations on a Grey Day...

I bundled up and took a walk today. The sky was grey and threatened to rain again... and again... and again. I normally would have stayed inside on a day like today, but I knew that I needed to get out of the house. I've felt too stagnant lately, stewing inside the walls of my home. Perhaps I had a touch of cabin fever? In any event, I bundled up and took a walk today. The cold air made my lungs sting. My breath escaped my lips in thin, wispy, ribbons of steam. I could tell without seeing myself in a mirror that my nose was red.

Most of the green has faded to brown or bleached out golden. Bottlebrush grasses wave in the wind, combing the breeze with prickly hairs.

In the woods, someone excavated a child's lost treasures now faded and rusty, and various bits of debris. When all the leaves fall and the landscape becomes barren of undergrowth, things emerge. Old bottles and crumbling spray cans that have weathered many long seasons, come out and can be seen.

I marveled at the pattern of a fallen tree. The wood was soaked with cold rain, making the striations darker. The texture was smooth and weathered. I wonder how much longer before its rings and many years of making merge with the forest floor, becoming rich earth and feed another generation?

The woods look naked to me. All the leaves lay strewn around the bases of the trees like discarded clothes of a lover. Nothing hides their branches. They are left to shake in the chill of the wind stripped.

An injured tree bleeds sap. Rain runs down the tree. Droplets of water form where the clusters of oozed out jelly have collected. I know, without needing to be told, that this tree will not survive the winter. I can see it, without seeing it, laying partially buried by a snowdrift. It is a black line peeking from beneath a blanket of whiteness. But today it is still grey out and has yet to fade to white, and the tree still stands.