Wild Words: the memory of light
Kirsteen Bell, from Duisky, is a regular freelance reporter and contributor to the Lochaber Times. This week she marvels at the wonder of nature.
The air has changed. Watery light trickles through the trees growing on the hill behind our house as the sun begins to skiff along their tops.
The earth has just passed the spring equinox, the side of the planet we live on now tilting towards the sun. Our days and nights are roughly equal and our biological memory carries the sense there are brighter days to come.
Trees and plants carry that same memory. The increase in daylight is a starting flag. The survival of every individual life on this planet depends on its ability to recognise and react to changes in its environment and the primary condition that plants need to survive is light.
The old oak growing out of the east stone wall has been around the sun many more times than I have. On one side of the wall its branches reach towards morning and on the other they point towards Venus. I can't wrap my arms around its full trunk. It is wrapped instead with silky moss, reaching up and along the thicker branches where the moss is joined by the filigree of oak lichen.
Only the slender outermost branches are completely bare, though already scored and gnarled in places, and tipped with this year's leaf buds.
The overlapping rose-brown scales of each bud are thick enough to hold the future safe and thin enough to let in the shining photons that tell the leaves when it is time to grow.
Somewhere in its cells, the oak knows its path around the sun. Year on year median temperatures change, weather systems change, numbers and types of predator change, but underneath it all the earth continues spinning on its axis, continues spinning around the sun.
The oak knows it has to get the timing right, has to align the moment when its leaves burst from their buds to give the tree its best possible chance of enduring, and so it waits. It waits for those reliable, unchanging rhythms of light.
The trees remember the pattern of light stretching out from east to west, they remember enough to know there will be a summer in which all their green will be released to convert light into energy.
The tiny embryonic cells in the heart of each bud are the starting point for another cycle, another growth ring, another year.
For now, though, the buds remain tight, holding the memory and promise of light within.