Posted: Sep 20, 2000
The leaves outside my window will begin to lose their green soon. In the weeks to come, my sleepy eyes will awaken to the light of sunrise and see brilliant red, orange, yellow and brown, hanging like masterless marionettes in the still air, until a breath of wind stirs them into a lazy multicoloured sway, casting crazy shadows across the sidewalk. The first year I lived at my present abode (in a duplex downtown, a half an hour's bike ride to university), I got my hands on a super 8mm camera, as an outlet for my creativity. In the fall, I got the chance to capture these colours for posterity (whatever little posterity the super 8 community can foster). The leaves fell as fall crept into winter, and snow began to cover their tracks. The following January, the branches started to fall. In January '98, an ice storm of fairly hefty proportions (which local folk refer to as The Ice Storm) covered trees and power lines with a thick, transparent sheen of ice, up to 2cm in places (that's almost an inch for the metrically challenged). Branches were bent and broken, trees were split, power lines collapsed, things blew up, the streets were impassable. Cool.
The result was that many of the trees around here look amputated now. Nature has left her mark on herself, but she doesn't care. It's all part of the job for her. You win some, you lose some. It's a universal karma system -- everything is connected, like, say, ocean temperature off the northwest coast of South America and the tree outside my window. It's looking none the worse for wear now, as it's had the chance to begin its healing process. But damn, if that doesn't give some kick to ecological chaos theory.
As the seasons turn, many things change -- like my desktop background.
A spring rose, a summer mountain, a fall forest.
God bless the trees.
D.