The Music of a Winter Walk

On the first real afternoon of “true” winter, we took the short hike through our woods.  “Winter,” of course, doesn’t mean what it once did in Iowa.  It was 60 degrees and damp from recent drizzles - a long way from the feet of snow and frigid air once routine here this time of year.  Of course very little in Iowa resembles what it once did.  Once hospitable, reasoned and magnanimous, the body politic has become wrong-headed, small-hearted and mean-spirited.  While global warming has stricken the climate, social chilling has enveloped our culture.  Desperately in need of attracting new residents, we seem determined, instead, to repel them.  Climate change, indeed.

But that’s another story.  

Today, in late December, the afterglow of the Winter Solstice, when snow, by all rights, should be covering the landscape and parkas insulating our bodies, we hiked in shirt sleeves; our boots caking mud instead of ice..

There was evidence of green close to the ground.  There were buds on bushes and trees.  A few chestnuts had fallen which we’ll pick up tomorrow when we return with heavy gloves to blunt the spiky jacket.    We saw no animal movement beyond the single rabbit that scurried away from the threat he perceived us to pose, though the evidence of deer passage was plain and plentiful.  What struck us the most were the fallen limbs.  Everywhere - in the woods, on the trail; twigs and branches, limbs and whole trees.  Nature’s pruning.  Today’s detritus, tomorrow’s fecundity.  Which is to say that the trees, too, have changed; though while we have collectively grown tighter, they have simply become lighter.  Everywhere around us in the silent woods, a quiet sigh of fatigue or repose settling into winter’s quiescence. 

We pushed a few branches aside as we passed, admiring the juniper berries and the undulations of the land before emerging near the bee hives into the prairie, and its tall veiling grasses.  This, too, an echo of what Iowa used to be.  And we drifted back along the westerly section of the trail toward home.  It was good to be out, even if it doesn’t feel like winter.  Tomorrow, if the weathercasters can be believed, will be warmer still, and then rain on the day after.  

But today we walked in the woods, and shivered for reasons that had nothing to do with the weather.  It was good to be outside, taking long steps and deep breaths.  And in the dimming stillness of the afternoon’s setting sun we hear a hint of the carol, “...all is calm, all is bright.”  Surveying the wind-blown branches and broken limbs - the flotsam and jetsam of stormy turbulence - we hear a hint of angelic reassurance, “Don’t be afraid.”  In the unbent tall grasses, the prophetic pronouncement, “Peace on earth, goodwill...”

And we shivered again as, just for today, we knew it.