Late Autumn Trees

During the Advent season and after, the trees have a wonderful softness and faintness. The normal perspective of distance makes trees look ill-defined, but in late autumn and winter, the mostly leafless trees take on a pretty half-transparency. To me, the color looks like a watercolor artist mixed brown and green, or brown and purple, and used a lot of water to get the pale, barren appearance, like these trees beside the railroad tracks near our home. Maybe they’re not “happy trees,” as Bob Ross would say, but they’re beautiful in a different way than the other seasons.

I found an old postcard on ebay, probably intended as a generic scene, but it captures some of the faded timber beyond the evergreen trees and the cold stream. When you walk in woods in late autumn, brown leaves cover the ground, eventually becoming soil. It’s pleasant to walk through nature during this time of year, as long as you’re bundled up.

Snow brings substantiality to that faintness, as in this photo of trees around the lake in Akron, OH by which we used to live. Enough brightness is added to the tree branches to bring details into view.

A while ago, I did a lighthearted search for “trees in the Bible.” I was struck by the connection of trees with God’s relationship to us: the Trees of Life and of Good and Evil in Eden, the cypress wood that formed the saving Ark of Noah, the acacia wood used for the Ark of the Covenant as well as the Tabernacle and its various components (Ex. 25, 30, 36-39), the Lebanon cedar and other woods used in Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 5-7, 2 Chr. 2-4), the wood of Christ’s manger, the cross (the “tree” on which Christ took our curse: Deut. 21:22-23; Gal. 3:3) and finally the restored tree of life of Revelation 22:2. Some of those are examples of wood being used, not trees per se, and the Bible has many references to different kinds of trees.

Today, I’ve been thinking about Advent as the beginning of the Christian year, a season of remembrance of Christ’s birth and of expectation of Christ’s return, and I've been thinking of the way the trees outside look. Perhaps the half-transparent timber of December is a way to think about Christ’s return, too: life is beautiful now but expectant for a greater beauty, yet to come.