Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Whose woods these are...

"The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries, and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically...he was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple."
-Excerpt from The Wind and the Willows

When Mole ventures out into the Wild Woods on a winter's day, the woods is presumably set in England. Yet today, when I read the description of the winter-blighted forest, I thought, that could be Indiana. 

The southern part of the state especially is a very wooded place--not the vast, flat fields one might imagine, but rather densely forested hills occasionally broken up by an obliging field or encroaching farm. In spring and even more in summer, these forests seem impenetrable--but when I drove along the highways and backroads in the late fall and in the depths of winter, I was always captivated by how starkly different these scenes were. Previously imposing clusters of trees and bushes now seemed so much more sparse; forests seemed to reveal themselves for miles--stretches of snow with patches of brown, soggy earth poking through; feeble shrubs picked bare; grey and greatly diminished trees, all of it stretching on and on and on for miles and seeming to be so open and honest about its contents and life.

Sometimes I feel like my spirit is like an Indiana forest in midwinter.

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