The Bone Trees

I sit here at my table, looking out on a world that is slowly waking up from winter. The grass is starting to show itself as green again after months of being covered by layers of white, and life is returning.

Over these months it has been the apparent death of things which has affected me the most. Where I come from, bare, blackened branches clawing toward the sky represent death; fire perhaps, or blight. Australia is a place of evergreen, khaki and brown, where things may turn yellow in the blistering sun but will only shed their foliage in the most dire of times and come back to life at the merest hint of rain. When things truly die, the locals mourn.

Canada is a land of contrasts, where the seasons truly change and the cycles of life are illustrated in the weather. We have been buried in white for months, broken only by the black of trees denuded by the cold. Their twisted skeletons stripped of their finery seem laid bare in death, and are a morbid reminder of what lies ahead of us all. To sleep, perchance to dream of sunshine.

It is this which has been the most depressing part of winter for me. The cold I could tolerate, and it's true when they say that after a certain point you don't really feel the difference in temperature anymore. Funnily enough it's as it's warming up now - around 0 degrees Celcius - that I'm feeling chilled again. Yet one can put on more clothes, stoke the fire and turn up the furnace until we can make believe that it's as warm without as it is within. One look at the trees, though, and you know that it's dead cold.

The highways are lined with maple trees and other kinds of evergreens, and this place is spectacular in the warmer months. Even now I can see them starting to bud, and know there is the promise of beauty in the barrenness. However, as we travelled through the winter-huddled trees,  their empty branches reaching for the sun, what I saw were hands beseeching the world to be less brutal. It was wearying after a while, deep in a part of me that quietly believes that trees only look this way when their world has ended.

I've been a long-time member of Team Winter, but I am glad the sun is coming back out again. Like the Canadians around me, I am pleased to see the snow going for another year. Bring on the squirrels.