Birch and Aspen

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Birch and Aspen - certainly different, but hard to tell the difference, at a glance - believe it or not, they are not even in the same family. We have both on the Photo Farm, and I love it.

As a recent Robert Frost fan, who was also a part-life Vermonter, I will refer to both white bark attracters as ‘Birches’, in honor of Frost’s poem titled the same .

Frost writes in Birches: “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it is likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped it’s top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back, One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

Birch Bend SonyRX 100 VI 12.25mm 1/125 sec f4.5 ISO 125 stitched

After a recent snow fall, I better visualize Frost’s sentiments on swinging birches. I shake a snow covered, weighed down, birch over the driveway, as I plow my way to Wolf Lane. Me and my green and yellow John Deere are now white all over. What is astonishing to me is, with a little shake, the tree sprang back to nearly upright, like a catapult. I would have been pulled off the Deere, to the sky, if I hadn't let go.

A short while ago I designated a cove, on the Photo Farm, in a patch of birches, to be a proper place for a bench to rest and meditate. I am moved more to do such, with my recent visit to capture the snow impact.

Birch Cove SonyRX 100 VI 9mm 1/200 sec f6.3 ISO 125

I am now, in my mind, “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father’s trees , By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung , not one was left For him to conquer.”