The sky is flat and gray-white, and the snowfield spreads out at the same brightness. In the narrow band between them, two trees stand without a single leaf, etching themselves into the sky down to the tips of their branches. A single power line runs off at an angle past the left edge of the frame, and dry grass pokes up through the snow with a reddish cast.
With no leaves, the structure of the tree is plainly visible. Branches split off from the thick trunk and split again and again, growing endlessly finer, a shape calculated over decades to catch even one more grain of light. All summer the leaves that hung from these branch tips seized carbon from the air and packed it into the trunk and roots, and what was stored that way now stands as black lines on the snow.
The ground underfoot is not empty either. The snow holds in the earth's warmth like a blanket, and in the soil roots and microbes slowly break down fallen leaves to make the nutrients for the next season. A winter field is quiet not because nothing is happening, but because the work is going on where it cannot be seen.
A landscape like this does not keep itself. The time a single old tree has accumulated ends with one pass of a saw, and to grow the same thickness again takes decades. The choice to leave the old trees of a neighborhood standing, the choice to plant young trees on empty ground, hands this winter frame to the next generation.
Late March snow does not last long. Soon buds like millet grains will swell at each of these branch tips, and light green will spread across the gray-white frame. Look at the photograph once more. You can see that those branches are not empty, that they have already taken hold of the next season.
