Hearing nothing, everything.

It's easy in the bustling clashes of spring to see beauty everywhere. Green burgeons into yellow into blue sky, and everywhere there is the buzz of bugs and people going outside for the sake of it. Warmth that jostles the cells of your skin so that even you feel a certain burning. Life is blooming everywhere in all of its noisy, chaotic urgency. An obvious beauty.

It's easy to forget, then, how beautiful it is to walk in late fall. How simply necessary it is, how vital it feels to the soul. We walked yesterday just before the sun went down and it was chilly and gray and brown and still. The trees have been scraped nearly barren over the last few weeks, and where leaves remained on branches they were yellow and fragile, shivering in the wind. You can see for miles through the tress now and everything stands so certain, so solid and resolute.

If you stopped walking to listen, you would hear: nothing. Nothing except a cold endless sweep of sound in the distance, cars rushing down a nearby road, the lonely sound of a plane overhead, the tiny rustling of leaves from creatures burrowing deep against the cold.

The river, even. The swirls and eddies that I could swear make noise in the spring are eerily silent, slipping and overlapping in one long, continuous run over the top of the water. Little whirlpools appear here and there. We stopped to listen and heard: nothing. A long silence.

On the walk home we talked of poetry, and I told the girls about the Yehuda Amichai poem where he describes a woman whose skin is made of lizards, and all of them love the sun. We talked about the same poem, where the woman has the laughter of grapes, many round, green laughs. I asked the girls what that would sound like.

"Shaking," Madeleine says. "Like when they're in the trees and the wind blows them."

We're quiet as I contemplate that. It's a perspective I hadn't considered - I always think of when you eat grapes, how they feel in your mouth and how sweet they are when you bite them. I like her take here in this long, quiet cold - the poem feels sadder to me from her perspective, more grounded. I picture green grapes hanging from the vine, trembling in the wind, on the verge of falling. I feel grateful.