Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

— “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost

The morning of January first dawned cold, but bright and sunny. Just before sunrise, I noticed tiny, frozen droplets of yesterday’s rain clinging to the very tips of the bare oak tree branches outside the window and couldn’t wait for the sun to come up and shine through them.

I was not disappointed.

Everywhere around me, ice crystals sparkled from oaks, maples, birches and pine, flashing gold and red in the shifting light. Even as I was writing several hours later, the bejeweled landscape continued to dazzle me with its brilliance. With each slight movement of the branches in the breeze, the drops catch the sun’s glow and split it into multiple pinpoints of light. What a fine way to start a new year.

Even as a young person, I dreamed of one day making my home in such a place, and I am living proof that dreams, though they be distant and impossible at some stages of our lives, do indeed come true, and sometimes when we least expect. My dream started to take shape after reading Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” back in the mid-1960s. Always an avid reader, I came upon Thoreau in high school and was soon envisioning how I would fashion my own secluded cabin. Despite the fact that I grew up in the city of Biddeford, I was forever seeking out the forgotten places, the neglected fields and other tracts of land that lay untouched between and behind houses in the city’s outermost neighborhoods.

As fate would have it, time marched on, I grew up, and other dreams took precedence, pushing my Waldenesque reveries to a distant corner of my mind. It wasn’t until many years later that they returned, but I never dreamed they would lead me here. The significance of the move was deeply impressed upon me, and I decided right away to make the most of my time here. Aside from a few distractions, which life never fails to hand us from time to time, I have never strayed from that commitment, one whose imperative has intensified for me these last few years.

If it is possible to love a place with the same passion and intensity as might exist between two people, then I have surely known that here. And if asked to state the greatest object of my affection, it would have to be the trees, those stalwart faithful beings that have been there at the beginnings and ends of all the days I have spent here. They’ve been immortalized in poetry, art and literature, from Frost’s description of birches bent under heavy winter loads to Tolkien’s last march of the Ents, the tree people that save the mythical town of Isengard in “The Two Towers,” the second book of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And it is the rare impressionist painter who hasn’t turned his or her eye toward trees at some point, depicting them in all their beauty, from winter’s barrenness to spring’s awakening, from summer’s lushness to autumn’s splendor.

Sometimes against our better judgments and sincerest wishes, life has other plans for us, and we often have no choice but to acquiesce to its realities, harsh as they are to take at times. I’ve spoken often of how one can never truly own the land or the trees or other wildlife that exist on it, and someday, I will part from this place forever. For now, I will continue to let my gaze linger on the moss that clings to the slope and the old faithful pines that tower over this wooded world. I will breathe in the cold, crisp, clean air with its notes of damp earth and decayed leaf and be reminded of whence I come. And when all is said and done and life takes me from here, I will be happy in memories, if in nothing else, and happier still if, wherever this journey takes me, there will be trees to call friends.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.