Vignette: When Trees Hold Their Breath
The Geography of Absence
I walk these winter woods carrying grief like frost in my bones—each step a meditation on what remains when warmth departs.
The morning unfolds in shades of silver and shadow, every surface holding reflections that seem to speak of passages I'm not yet ready to understand.
At the water's edge, a pool mirrors bare branches with such perfect stillness that reality seems to fold in on itself.
Which is more true—the tree reaching toward sky, or its reflection reaching into depths?
Like death, these waters hold secrets in their darkness, preserving images of life while transforming them into something otherworldly, something just beyond grasp.
My grandfather used to say that winter strips everything to its essence.
Now, as I study the layers of decomposing leaves trapped beneath ice—their veins still visible like memories refusing to fade—I understand what he meant.
Death, like winter, doesn't erase; it reveals.
Each fallen log hosts colonies of fungi that glow orange in the low sun, transforming decay into strange beauty. Life and death dance here in endless cycles, each feeding the other's story.
Between the trees, where shadows gather like unspoken thoughts, I find traces of my own reflection fragmented across patches of ice.
The cold air burns in my lungs, a sharp reminder of presence in this landscape of absence.
How strange that we fear death's stillness when nature shows us its necessity.
These bare branches will green again because they learned to let go, these waters will flow because they first learned to freeze.
I discover a hollow in an ancient tree, its interior smooth from years of weathering. Placing my hand against this void, I feel the rough edges of bark giving way to polished wood—like the way grief smooths out with time, leaving something different but no less true.
The last light catches in a nearby puddle, and for a moment, the reflection holds both darkness and radiance, reminiscent of how we carry our dead: their absence and presence inseparable, like two sides of the same mirror.
As shadows lengthen into evening, ice crystals form along branch tips, each one a perfect prism of the fading light.
I think of how my grandmother described death as "stepping through a mirror"—not an ending but a transformation, like water changing state.
Standing here among these trees that have witnessed countless cycles of death and renewal, I begin to understand: winter teaches us how to hold both loss and continuation in the same breath.
The forest grows quiet now, save for the occasional crack of ice or distant call of a winter bird.
In this stillness, I find a strange peace—the kind that comes from recognizing that death, like these reflected woods, is not empty but full of inversions, echoes, and unexpected beauty.
We are all part of this endless turning, our stories written in rings of wood, in layers of ice, in the spaces between what is and what has passed.
As twilight approaches, I trace my steps back through the gathering dark, watching my breath cloud and dissolve in the cold air—a reminder that even our most temporary expressions become part of this larger dance between presence and absence, between what we hold and what we must release.
To Norman, RIP.