Palette of Place
As I sit down to write this, we’re in for an inch and a half of rain in the next twenty-four hours. If I could hand pick the conditions in which to get creative work done, these are the ones I would choose: windy, heavy rain, low forties.
I’ve been building a palette of place—a mental mood board of sorts, a compilation of the sensory input that together creates my experience of what it is to be at home on the Salish Sea at winter’s end.
I’ve just built a fire in the wood stove, partly to spoil the dog, who will scoot her entire backside onto the tile under the firebox and roast herself gleefully for hours, and partly for its ambient noise. Thus curated, my late winter auditory palette consists of: wind, rain hitting the metal roof just a few feet above my head, a crackling fire and ticking wood stove, and the occasional yip and growl of a dog dream.
The air smells of cedar and I couldn’t tell you at this point if the association for me between the smell of cedar and the sense of home has grown over the years or if I was born searching the air for it.
Cedar surrounds me in all of its many expressions and life stages. The pungent live cedars whose scent carries especially well on winter’s wet air rain down their phytoncides. There is magic in knowing that when I can smell cedar, I am actively receiving wellbeing from it in the form of airborne chemicals released to protect the tree from bacterial and viral pathogens.
Fragrant cedar siding clads our house and lines a handful of interior walls. The smell of cedar smoke from the chimney is occasionally wafted downward on strong gusts. The scent of decaying cedar logs—the sweetly soured edge overtop the cedar’s signature pleasant sharpness—lifts from the ravine.
Layering in over the predominant notes of cedar is a smell so ephemeral, so particular to these last weeks of winter, it begs mentioning; the wild cherry trees have bloomed. If I stand under the perfumed canopy of a wild cherry in just enough light I can convince myself I’m smelling pink. It’s the only experience I’ve had that approaches synesthesia, mine for the taking for about three weeks, along a three mile stretch of road that parallels the shore.
I’m emerging from a winter lull where actually getting a taste of place is concerned. The last foraged food I ate was a small bundle of hedgehog mushrooms, harvested from the forest near my house before the deep freeze in mid January.
But the nettles have pushed through the soil’s surface, and in their usual droves. I can taste their bitterness as I think of them, and all the associated goodness that comes with that quality of flavor. A 2022 National Institute of Health paper reviews the medicinal significance of the nettle: they’re rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant compounds that work together in the body to lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, placate ulcers, combat pain, and soothe arthritis, among other things. All in a humble, ubiquitous “weed.”
They’re ready to harvest now. For ease of walking barefoot and bare legged I’ve mostly cleared the nettles from around our house, but they’re prolific on the trails through the neighborhood and across the island.
Opposite the stinging nettle end of the tactile sensation spectrum is the touch I enjoy most this time of year: moss. Along the back border of our home runs a waist high rock wall covered in feathery manes of moss. I’ve set to work in these last couple weeks excavating this wall out from under years of dead huckleberry and salal canes that have hidden the architecture of the cedar trunks and the stout stones with their crop of textural growth.
Not much sun penetrates all the way to this ground; the trees along this perimeter have grown up in the years since the rock wall was constructed. I’ve cut back all the shrubs to give them a chance in the newly cleared space, but a big part of me hopes that the moss will migrate off the rock walls onto the nearly bare soil with a little encouragement.
As I move south down this mossy rock wall I’ve run into tangles of honeysuckle that have strangled a number of madrona saplings. Late winter is a great time for pulling weeds the local garden columnist Ann Lovejoy has just reminded us. As far as feelings go, pulling out wads and coils of vining, strangling plants—ivy, blackberry, honeysuckle, bindweed—and feeling each little hair of root break away as the main cord of the plant is lifted from the pliant soil is among the most satisfying.
I turn my attention toward my vision. If each of these sensations—late winter’s sounds, smells, tastes, and feels—occupies a wedge of space on a palette of place, I wonder what must the wedge apportioned to sight look like, in comparison? Even when using language to imagine, I invoke sight: what must it look like?
The colors of late winter are my favorite of the year. The catkins on the alder dangle in rusted pairs. This color is echoed in last year’s spent bracken fern, ocean spray blooms, and cedar fronds.
Apart from these contrasting occasions of rust, and the first pink blooms of the cherries, the primary color experience of this place—year round, really, but in winter especially—is green. Green in every saturation and tone imaginable.
The hazelnut’s catkins are a soft gold-green, the same gold-green that paints the smooth bark of the madrona at the moment.
The madrona’s leaf, on the other hand—along with that of the evergreen huckleberry and the sword fern—is an emerald green—the lone jewel tone in this palette.
The boughs of the fir and hemlock trees are quintessential forest green. The cedar boughs in the late winter variety of light conditions can appear yellowish or bluish, and sometimes both in a spectacular tonal iridescence orchestrated by a bit of wind.
It is the trunks of the cedars though where the most astonishing array of green is to be found. In an informal experiment I have yet to bring a swatch of green fabric to one particular patch of one particular cedar trunk and fail to find an exact tonal match in the tree’s resident colony of mosses and lichens. Everything from mint to lime, seafoam to forest, and every tint and shade in between. An infinity in green.
All that on color alone, to say nothing of the patterns to be found in the exposed trunks of trees and the draping forms of evergreen foliage, or the rain that falls in visible undulations. To say nothing of the deer who have returned from wherever they disappear to in winter’s coldest months to again sit placidly in the rain for hours in the thick moss of my neighbor’s front garden.
A sea of green with a dash of rust, the scent of cedar and salt air, the sound of rain, the feel of moss underhand, and the gentle movements of deer—this spare elegance is the sensorial framework of place upon which the many textured and formed and colored and flavored experiences of the progressing seasons are laid overtop each other. There is something shining and singular in winter’s palette, an elegance with a lot to say about simplicity.
As spring approaches, the complexity of this sensory palette is already increasing, and that increase is, of course, welcome. We’ve just graduated from the sparest palette of the year with the first blooming shrubs and trees, the evening chorus of frogs, and the fists of bracken fern pushing through the soil.
“I don’t know what prayer is. I do know how to pay attention,” Mary Oliver wrote in her well loved poem “The Summer Day.” There is no point to this—this exercise in constructing a mental palette of place—except to notice, and in doing so appreciate and honor my home and my senses and the passing of seasons more deeply.
