Friday Ramble - The Sisterhood of Eye and Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in late January. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You burn candles and brew endless pots of tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way. The great horned owls who reside on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are repairing their nest in an old beech tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood. It makes me happy to think it is all happening again.

This morning, a single oak leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind and came to rest in a corner of the garden. The day's first gift was not bleached or tattered, so it must have been resting in the depths of the cedar hedge for some time. A simple thing perhaps, but the pairing of pumpkiny orange leaf and blue snow was fetching stuff indeed.

The dear little folio bore in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity a much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf. Out of small and ice rimed doings, a mindful life is made.