Charlie came to visit last week. He is a life-long naturalist, enchanted with the ways of creation, and committed to sharing his passion and knowledge with others. We met through that passion and my blog.

So when he offered to take me on a tour of my land, two acres of trees, grass and assorted groundcover, how could I say no?

Charlie is the consummate teacher. He brought a storehouse of knowledge, hand-lenses that magnified ten and twenty times, the patience of Job, and an unquenchable curiosity.

Off we went, Charlie, my husband and me. The goal: to enlighten two benighted but repentant souls, eager to now see what we have for too long overlooked.

One of the first things we did was tend to the smudges of green and white on our trees, smudges that I had always ignored, or even found slightly unsightly. But under Charlie's tutelage, we grasped our hand lenses and learned that these stains on our tree trunks were in fact whole villages of life.

They were lichens with the most intricate of lacings and valleys and folds. Exquisite is not too grand a word for these tiny civilizations. And alluring. It would have been grand to have been shrunken and transported, like Mary Poppins into Bert's sidewalk drawings, into this captivating foreign world, to walk around the swirling, crenellated walls. How would it feel to ride out a storm, huddled in the shelter of its caverns and curves? How would our voices sound bouncing off the porous, scalloped sides? What is the quality of light in such crumpled spaces?

We moved on, identifying various trees by the arrangement of their branches, the structure of their leaf buds, the tracings of their bark. We saw where the seventeen-year locusts laid eggs on the branches, damaging if not killing that shoot; we measured how much the tree grew in a year, comparing one year's growth to another. (The difference could be astonishing, as much as 100% more in one year than the next. Was that the year of the drought? Of stress? Who knows what?)

Charlie showed us a magnificent, enormous mushroom covering about a square foot of stump on a grand old tree that was cut down years ago. I had never noticed it before. It is called a turkey tail mushroom because of its undulating surface and its deep, variegated colors. I could not believe how stunning it was, and that I had never noticed it before.

(To see a turkey tail mushroom, click:
http://www.edupic.net/Images/Fungi/turkey_tail_fungi03.JPG)

I asked Charlie about a tree that kept its leaves all winter, turning them to a delicate parchment color, and hanging onto them ferociously, come what may. In a forest, they stand out in the cold months, draping their host in quivering golden tags, grabbing the attention of anyone whose glance sweeps their way.

They were, of course, young beech trees. For some reason, they keep their leaves until early spring, although the mature tree does not. That is what threw me off. Charlie asked me to notice when they lose their leaves.

Charlie asked lots of questions about our trees that Avram and I could not answer, even though we have lived here and been witness to the seasons for ten years. Are the blossoms white on this cherry tree? Does that tree produce whirly-gig seeds? What do the buds of this tree look like? It was shocking to realize what we did not know, and even more, what we had ignored. But no more. We intend to be more attentive this year.

We spent two hours walking outside and even so left much unexplored.

Charlie will be back. He wants to see some of the trees in bloom.

Meanwhile, I looked yesterday. The young beech was naked at last, sporting just a few die-hard leaves. Up close, you can see its tell-tale cigar-shaped and -colored leaf buds. A new season has begun.

Oh, and my apple trees survived the winter and are beginning to leaf.

Just in time for Passover.

May you have a sweet, renewing and discovery-filled holiday.