The young wood stood in mute congress, a thousand thin stems rising with anxious propriety. Snow lay upon each twig in narrow stipples, not enough to burden, only to annotate, as if winter had scattered fine motes of whiteness and moved on. Light entered lowly, catching on bark and branch, breaking the scene into a careful trichrome of chalk, dark and rust. One beech leaf stood out, singular and incurious, a small parchment of mantled coppered gold suspended amid the white accounting. It neither stirred nor yielded. Around it, the saplings waited. The ground below lay restless yet quiet, under white soon to melt. Insects sheltered.
