No color left to speak of in the woods. It’s ash gray, bone colored, drab greens and browns. The feel of cold wind rushing through a bare forest. Keeping an eye on the creaking trees (they sound like zippers). How the wind builds like the tides coming in and reminds me of camping by the ocean. That sound of water coursing over the shore as it recedes. I love the look of the woods in winter when there’s snow but it’s rare. This is what fall looks like when it’s fully fallen.

Then the bizarre way the light seeps through when you’re in between weather systems and the clouds break; you can see why the Greeks thought the gods were at war. I keep low to the ground like a rat. The scents of wet earth and must, molds, the dead. This is the time of nightshades and fungus, moss and lichen.

And so with the color stripped out it really is the moss that shines, in that 60s album art kind of way with exaggerated mushroom shapes, vibrant textures, dreamlike scenes. To walk through the forest in a wind storm is unsafe but thrilling. Didn’t Walt Whitman or John Muir do it too? You need to be there to get it on a soul level, with the rats.

The tall cottonwood widow makers are the worst, it’s like walking through the chamber of a gun. How quiet it gets before the wind regroups. Someone came through and blew all the leaves off the trail so now they’re stacked on the sides, the color of a calico cat. Different parts of the forest have different vibes as you pass the cottonwood grove and slope down to a darker section. Here they’re more pines and firs, everywhere ferns.

I swing my walking stick like a broad sword to clear a fallen branch from my path and now the strong winds are back, the really big trees swaying above. They hold onto each other with roots interlaced like arms locked, and I like to think we are all holding each other up like that too. It is life or death out here, pick one or the other.

(Later)

With the smell of the grass cut it was a weird mash up of summer and winter at our house. I could get real finicky about hanging ornaments or lights on trees. With the sun low in the sky it gave an uplight effect on the tall trees, highlighting the varying shades of green. Only a few birds about, the sound of their small peeps a cry for spring. But we hadn’t even started winter yet.

Inside the house the classical music station played and I liked music like that around Christmas. It made it feel like we were all in a theater production. They were fundraising, being non-commercial and having their federal funding taken away. I guess our president didn’t think we needed noncommercial radio. He is such a dick. He brings out the worst in people and makes all of us small.

They were doing some lilting thing with their voices now, choral music with happy trumpets like it was Christmas morning. You could see people out on the streets with snow and old lamp lights and kids laughing, nineteenth century England. It was still there in the music, coming through the sound waves, in the creaking trees and bending roots. Holding ourselves aloft.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Diary, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, inspiration, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest