November Wetlands: Variations on a Theme
When last I saw the wetlands, they were alive with summer’s colors. Between the ranks of reeds, mallards floated on high waters. Bullfrogs twanged their bass notes from lily pads. Bees buzzed among rainbow heaps of wildflowers and the leafy trees danced to the sweet symphonies of countless singing birds.
Now, everything had changed. At first glance, the place seemed colorless and drained, and the air was incredibly still. The only things I could hear as I walked the trail around its circumference were the crunch of fallen sycamore leaves beneath my boots and my own breathing.
But as I walked, allowing my thoughts to still, the silence surrounding me took on the feel of holiness, and my mind opened to the depth of the beauty before me.
A masterpiece of reinvention was spread before my eyes. Soft spent goldenrod danced in the breeze, and beneath an azure sky, bleached reeds shimmered in the sun. Where the waters had receded vast swaths of mossy earth stretched in hues of olive and ocher.
This was November’s homage to the changing seasons, a creation made of long nights and short days, her own variation on the wetland’s theme. And the more I looked, the more beauty I saw in this transposition of the song into mid-autumn’s key.
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