sovay: (Silver: against blue)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-03-04 05:52 pm

You're as green as the season that quickens the breeze

Because of the geography of my ENT appointment this afternoon, [personal profile] spatch and I walked around the Arboretum afterward. "I love dead gardens," I said as we threaded among the winter-dry clumps and sticks of serviceberry and crabapples and hellebores and whitebeam and roses. "They look like T. S. Eliot."



A parallelogram of sky through the cork tree.



I was enchanted with the peacock-sheened peeling skin of the paperbark maple.



The cypress knees looked like standing stones and seals at the edge of the ice on Dawson Pond.



A stone was sleeping under the ice like a frog.



Rob took this windblown picture of me talking to one of the cork trees in memory of the thirty-year-fallen exemplar of my childhood, now one of the ghost trees of the Arboretum. Thus we learned after we had gotten home that the climbing of trees on the grounds is prohibited nowadays.

The traffic was sticky between the Arborway and Woburn, but we ate our dinner of roast beef sandwiches with great satisfaction in the car. It feels nuts to be alive. I'm working on it.
asakiyume: (the source)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2025-03-05 06:45 am (UTC)(link)
Everything is transforming! Your paperbark maple looks like water, rippling and reflecting the world above (as in my icon here). And then the other transformations you mention, cypress knees into standing stones; stone into a sleeping frog.

(Now if you can transform into a person without a sinus infection: perfection! You have the magic of sunlight on you, so ... maybe?)

Thank you for the link to the ghost trees and their stories.
asakiyume: (the source)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2025-03-05 02:02 pm (UTC)(link)
The icon photo is very old--I want to say in the aughts at some point? There's a spring in the woods behind my house: water bubbles up through sand, and it's a photo of that.