This morning, the catkins were luminous against a sky the colour of unglazed clay. The branches are still mostly bare, but along their length hang these soft tassels of yellow and pale lilac, catching what little light there is and holding on to it. When I step closer, I notice how often they grow in pairs, one slightly longer, the other shorter, as though leaning toward each other. They seem companionable. The longer catkin moves first in the breeze, and the smaller follows a second later. I find myself thinking about love in that small difference, and about longevity. About how rarely two things grow at precisely the same pace, and yet how naturally they can belong side by side.
The yellow ones are bright enough to startle against the hedgerow, tiny flares that resemble strands of DNA uncoiling or a row of miniature burning bushes. The lilac versions are softer, almost reticent, their colour closer to breath on a frost filled morning, than flame. From a distance, they read as repeated marks across the sky, a series of marks laid carefully along the margin of winter. I think of the yellow markers in the snow in Iceland, the slender posts that keep you on the right path when the land turns white and bottomless. I remember how necessary they felt there, how quietly reassuring. These catkins have something of that about them. They are not showy blossoms. They are signals. They say, “ Keep going”. They whisper, “There is a way through”.
I think, too, of a line from The Overstory by Richard Powers: “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
As I stand beneath the alder or possibly the hazel, it appears less like a philosophical statement and more like a simple fact. The catkins are not ornaments of the season. They are ancient gestures, older than any path I might try to follow. Their yellow and lilac threads tremble in the cold air, quiet, still determined, like small flames that refuse to go out.
They hang there in pairs, patient and unafraid of difference, marking the way forward long before the leaves appear. I take them in slowly and feel, if not certainty, then at least awe. A sense that also in this in-between season, something wise and enduring is already at work.