Every Season Has its Beauty

I'm not sure why the steady parade of ice patches, dislodged from the banks upstream and floating unawares down the river and ultimately disintegrating over the falls, kept me so focused through the windows of the restaurant overlooking the destruction. Perhaps it was the contrast between the gentle winter glide of the ice and the violent turbulence of the froth that ultimately consumed it. Perhaps it was some wordless lament for the winter warmth that was weakening the idyllic view and transforming it into bucolic flotsam and jetsam. Perhaps it was some subconscious connection with the larger bank, losing itself piece by piece to the inexorable flow of the river -- a metaphor of sorts that my soul understood but the rest of me dared not probe. Whatever, there was a feeling of melancholy as we watched them float by toward what seemed like destruction.

We had arrived the day before for what has become an annual New Year's retreat to Vermont. By now we have developed patterns -- touchstones to which we return -- and now on this first full day we couldn't wait to touch the first of them. Indeed, the first few of them. It is, indeed, warmer here than it should be this time of year, and though there is snow, there is dripping and slushing and mud now desecrating the white. But we have slogged our way around, nestling in to the leisure and reacquainting ourselves with the albeit more temperate splendor. Perhaps inspired by the melting, or simply the New Year's awareness of time and its passing, we have talked of aging -- aches and disappointments and hopes and exhilarations. We have talked of losses, but also of gains. We have talked of transitions and perspectives; fears and apprehensions; possibilities and resilient aspirations -- of what we've done, but all that we still yet have to do.

As if to practice, yesterday we took a new drive. Westward through the state along roads we hadn't traveled -- beautiful turns and nourishing mountains and beckoning streams. And as the sun began to settle, we turned for the drive back east, and there an entirely new education enrolled us. Mountainsides presented themselves before and around us -- whole panoramas of tree-covered slopes with the afternoon sun spotlighting them as if in a gallery. There was snow on the ground, but the trees rising above it glowed with a color I hadn't expected and can scarcely describe. Who knew that winter splayed this kind of palette? Copper and bronze and a muted rust -- not the riotous blaze of autumn's red and gold, but an earthier, quieter, fleshier beauty. We spoke less and less as the mountains in this wardrobe drew us in -- turn after turn, vista after vista pressing upon us the wisdom that every season has its beauty.

And I woke this morning well before I wished to with the revelation that the ice pieces on the river weren't falling to their destruction. They were river to begin with, and nothing about that, but the form, has changed. Who knows, downstream, what current or froth or ice, yet again, it may still become.