Trees.
On my morning commute, during the dark winter months, trees are seen only as ghostly skeletal images, standing gaunt and alone, glimpsed in the sweep of the headlights as I negotiate the narrow slippery country lanes.
In the evening my weary eyes see nothing but the black road ahead and the rain filled ditches lurking, waiting to ambush me at the first sign of inattention.
By mid February, as winter starts to ease its grip on the dark mornings, I see the trees now in more detail. Branches become discernable against the still grey sky. Frequently they are decorated with crows waiting patiently for the heat of the sun to warm their feathers.
By the end of the month I imagine I can distinguish a hint of green upon the tips of the still bare branches, but I dismiss this as wishful thinking. March is yet to come. The infamous March of many weathers. We may still get frost to kill any young sprouts overly eager to start the year, and snow is more than a possibility.
But by the first week of March I am amazed to spot the Hazel bushes along the margins decorated with pale yellow Catkins. Could this really be the harbinger of spring, with the long winter at last over?
The mere suggestion of colour seen earlier now turns into a definite blush of the purest bright green seen clearly in the ever lengthening daylight.
The crows, no longer sitting, waiting, but now flying hither and yon with bits of twig in their beaks and rudimentary nests already taking shape in the topmost branches of many of the trees.
April, in its turn arrives and with winter now forgotten, we see the trees in all their glory. Fresh vibrant leaves flutter in the gentle breeze with the sun shimmering on their brilliance.
With the temperature still too low to consider Picnics, the drive to work is made shorter with dreams of lunch on a blanket spread beneath a tree, with insects buzzing about us and the smell of crushed grass filling our nostrils.
Summer arrives, but now we are too busy to notice the subtle changes of the flora of the trees. The vibrant green of the early foliage is now a darker shade. The leaves, now rougher to the touch, sometimes sticky to ward off the marauding aphids, some rolled in upon themselves, already infected.
All to soon we realise that we have not appreciated the green motif of summer as the leaves turn, first a fiery red, resplendent in the low lying autumn sun, then brown and dying as the parent plant drains what nutrients it can from them before casting them off to fall to the ground where they are subsumed by the soil, the fungus and a myriad of tiny insects.
And so the cycle begins again.
As the days shorten I see again the lonely figures of the morning standing stark and alone in the fields as I sweep past in the warm cocoon of my car, and I count another year off the calendar of my short life.