remnant

"Winter remnant" is the term for those elements of a plant that are left bereft of apparent life throughout the long stretches of winter here in New England.  It's such a thick word, "remnant": what remains. A sign that something existed here before. It is a brittle word. Something that you could crush with your hands and slowly grind to powder. It implies that something has left. That what has

been is now vacant, excepting the evidence that it was here previously. It is a grey-brown word. A hard word. A word that follows death, and yet, at least with these plants, that is not at all true. The plants are still here, and they certainly haven't died. Their root system lies just beneath my feet, lying dormant. "Dormant" is a much better word. It implies that life is waiting.

I wonder if death is true. 

I wonder if dormancy is a much more proper term. 

If we are to inform ourselves using the only true evidence of life: the world around us, death, at least in this massive family of plants, is at most temporary, and at least, untrue. 

Rutland State Park is full of winter remnant. The world this morning, except for Chaucer, Henry,

Myself, and a small group of Cardinals and Blue jays, was for all appearances...gone past. Waiting silently. Henry laughed when I told him that the only thing moving in the park this morning was the river. He told me that Chaucer, who has been kept inside by how dark the early mornings are before I go to work, was certainly not still. He was running, frantically trying to "remark" all of the old marking places that his scent used to dominate.

The frogs are dug deep into muck and tucked soundly into deep pockets of broken bark, body temperatures lowered to between 45 and 49 degrees. Grey Tree Frogs freeze rock hard in the winter. If you were to pick one up, it would feel exactly like a stone. 

Waiting. 

Painted turtles sleep down deep in the muddy world at the bottom of ponds. Bears hibernate.

Squirrels are in their nests. Chipmunks lie several feet underground in hordes of collected acorns and nuts. The world is just waiting to come back to life.

This morning I thought that I might take a lesson from the plants. I might choose to look at life through the seasons and allow myself to believe that maybe death isn't final... nothing in life suggests that it is. 

Maybe "dormancy" is a better word. 

It implies waiting. 

db