Clear, blue sky and bright
sunshine, temperatures up from recent single digits to somewhere around the
freezing point. Up Novotny Road from M-22, where the road flattens out after
the steep hill, and beyond the driveway into the old Sedlacek place, there is a
winding two-track. Along it grow a few old wild apple trees.
A remnant fence post, bare of
boards or wire, stands near the main road, casting its shadow across the
snow-covered two-track. (Another fence post is almost hidden by overgrown apple
trees on the other side of the track.) Tawny grass stems cluster around the
fence post. Their leaves twist gracefully like ribbons. Some rise straight from the snow with no preamble, while others
have reflected enough sun to create small pockets, little shadowed craters, in
the snow around them, as do trees in the woods at the end of winter, when snow
is still on the ground but begins to retreat from the bases of individual
warming trunks.
Everything casts a shadow
today, from the largest tree to the smallest bird track. Any open stretch of
snow looks like wave-contoured sand beneath the water at the edge of Lake
Michigan, and so the snow casts shadows on itself along the contour lines made by
the wind as, swirled into wave patterns, the frozen ridges contrasting with the
expanse of crystals stretching to the next miniscule ridge.
The apple trees provide
startling color in an otherwise stark landscape. Never pruned, they are a
tangle of disordered limbs and branches. The oldest trunks have died. Their
bark long shed, they look similar in their bare woodiness to the fence posts nearby,
except that suckers have grown up around the old trunks to make new trees.
These are late
season apples. In November some were yellow, some red, the best-tasting with a
striped skin and white, very white but pink-tinged flesh. Now, in January, much
of the fruit remains on the trees but, frozen many times already, it has
changed color dramatically. Not yet shriveled, the glossy skin is somewhere
between the bright color of its ripeness and the resigned brown of old oak
leaves. These soft, old apples glow in the late afternoon sun. Some of them
weep juicy tears that catch the sunlight. Most have given up firm roundness for
soft, gently dented, still fleshy but now lumpy, almost apologetic shapes.
The track lies lower than the
orchard blocks that rise above it to the north and south. It winds secretively
eastward, ever downhill as it goes. Perhaps there was always a gully here, or
perhaps it was carved by decades of runoff. Besides the apple trees and
grasses, near the road there is red twig dogwood, and there are big thistles.
In the background are dark stands of conifers.
As the winter sun nears the
horizon, the light takes on a warmer and warmer color, while the air grows
correspondingly colder. To the senses, it is a paradoxical effect,
bone-chilling wind and glowing light increasing together.
