Understory

The forest in the months without leaves, when it stops being scenery and becomes company.

A forest in fog is a room with the walls taken away. The trunks step back into grey, the path leads somewhere you cannot see, and one thing at a time is allowed to speak.

Two crows in the top of a bare tree. A beech that kept its copper leaves and holds them out across the fog like an offering. One trunk lit by a shaft of sun in a wood that is otherwise black. One green fir among a thousand bare birches. A sapling with its arms out against a wall of pines. And when the snow comes, a single shrub throwing its shadow across the ripples.

I go back to the same woods in the Carpathians year after year, in the months when there are no leaves and no colour and no reason to, because that is when the forest stops being scenery and starts being company. I am not looking for the trees. I am looking for the quiet between them.