Today I am grateful for evergreens. Evergreens always make me sigh in relief, though I’m not always sure from what. Whenever I see their conical profiles in rows against houses or down the length of fences, I feel a calmness. Maybe it’s that they are constant. As the landscape around them changes from brown to white to the yellow-green of new fields and buds, they remain a deep emerald. Stately kings, changing the vast robes swathed around their bases from leaves to snow to grass with the seasons. Their shapes are so lovely, so pruned and pleasing. Tall, stately, firs rising firmly to the sky, their lower boughs gesturing benevolently in the breeze. Thin, shy cedars standing like young princes in attendance. Royal hollies with their hard, flower-like leaves and red berries like sprays of jewelry. From a distance, evergreens seem soft, lacy, delicate. But up close, their leaves are long thin needles, small sharp spikes or thorns. They must need that protection to remain beautiful through the hard times. They don’t let everything in, the cold, the drought, the wind. And, I think they help me remember when I am sad, that protecting yourself doesn’t make you any less beautiful. But mostly, I think I am grateful for the green. “Green is a healing color,” my mother used to say. “We are supposed to see green every day.” Seeing life and beauty is simply renewing. I guess that’s why, in the middle of winter, we borrow some branches and bring them inside to adorn our mantles and pull the needles through our fingers to smell that unmistakable perfume. Evergreens remind me that life is there, waiting patiently until we have weathered the cold.
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 15:49:15 +0000
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