Winter is a Book

Summer is a movie. It flies past in flashes of color and bursts of sound, leaving behind it no record of it's narrative. Spring was its preview and Fall it's rolling credits that spool across the screen dropping leaves like the names of protagonists, gaffers and animal handlers.

What of Winter then?

Winter is a book...

the gray and white pages which turn slowly. The damp and darkened boles of the naked trees stand crisscrossed like Roman numeral page numbers against the pale backdrop of the mountainside.

The unseen stories of earlier seasons are now revealed. The ethereal mists and rains made inanimate, a clean slate upon which is recorded the passage of every mouse, the lighting and hurtling forth of every bird, both predator and prey. The interwoven tracks of the coyote, first appearing in a single line, then three abreast, then braided like some ancient Celtic knot.

Blood spatter on the snow that would have gone entirely unnoticed in the vernal woods now gives jarring testimony to some violence done during the night by a bobcat or a great horned owl.

So too, does the hoar frost, on the westward facing tree trunks, bear witness to the prevailing wind that gathers moisture from the graves of the Overhill Cherokee buried beneath the impounded waters of the Little Tennessee river and paints it all along the spine of old Tsuluwei (Chilhowee) where they hunted, foraged and hid themselves in times of trouble or in search of solitude.

The blue smoke of Shaconage curling lazily from cabin chimneys, and the soft yellow glow of lamp light, no longer obscured by the forest canopy, call out to those fortunate enough to look down on them from above and sing the siren song

"Come home! Come home!" and they will. THEY will, but I cannot...for I am already there.

After all, what is a book if there is no one to read it?

— Boyd Hopkins, Head Naturalist at Blackberry Mountain