June looks well in green. A color of shadows and shades. Emerald, jade, forest, mint, basil, sage, juniper, moss, chartreuse, pine… And June looks well in the lights. In buttercup yellow, lemon yellow, second round dandelion yellow, and rose red, and rose pink, and dutch iris lavender, turtle flower purple.
June provides robust arugula and round, red radishes, and tall, sturdy, umbrellaed rhubarb stalks, raspberries-in my garden, bird-consumed before they can recolor from granular green to ruby red, the sturdy, prolific meadow green leaves of violets, waving and bowing fully unfurled ferns. Dusky sage, blue-green rosemary, yellow-green basil.
In the Tongass National Forest, well, actually on the very edge of one island with the land masses and interspersed waterways within southeast Alaska that are within the designated Tongass National Forest-a temperate-zone rain forest, much green of cedar and pine prevails, as in Wrangell-St. Elias National Forest just north of it. But slashes of brown, where land has slid down the nearly vertical mountains, standing just back of the waterways on each island, spit, peninsula, jetty, jut, or continental edge, hurt to see, to know it is because too much water too fast hurtled down toward receiving waters uprooting massive, passive, wind whistling red and yellow cedars, whose roots do not need to go deep for their trunks to grow tall, but whose roots do need something to sustain them, to provide the mycorrhizal exchange of nourishment and to hold onto, that will feed them and hold them to (don’t we all need such), from which, with downrushing rainstorm streams, they are loosed and as a kid on a slide (smooth surface, no grabbable grit)–first the “grit” is borne downhill tumbling in the hurtle of water, and then the now unrooted cedars, are knocked back at the knees and they are trajectoried perilously downward.
This is a rain forest you say, it is how it is. But at this latitude, it is also historically a snow forest. And, while rain totals in Tongass have risen in the past few years unlike most other parts of world, the heat of the worldwide drought is here too, and the snow totals have fallen far. Too far. No pack. No seasonal predictability. No seasonal order, random mishaps random disasters. Unfed until starved brown, cedars still stand tall until the insult-to-injury rainfall, and then they are uprooted and fall and slide.
I sit at my desk on this very becoming June day in Massachusetts. I wonder today at tomorrow. I wonder each day at the next. But first, before I concern myself with that, I wonder of today.
May you. Because to wonder wants to learn, but also wonder wants always to delight in. May you.
whereIwonder&why 