We came together in the spring, my love and I.

I will remember her always now entwined with the young oak leaves, yellow-green and brushed by pollen, unbearably tender. The morning of the day we came together, and the morning after, were marked for me by the oaks in their brief season of growth and flower, and I noticed them, gloried in them. It was a fine spring we had this year, and how do you not love an oak in its brief riotous season?

Oaks are lasting trees, gnarled, dark and heavy of thick trunk and curving branches, obdurate and old. The California valley oak, counterpoint to our redwood, is a stately, noble thing. Its leaves are tough and waxy, dark, serrated. They do not invite touch even from their own kind, each its careful island in golden pasture. They are shade and benediction and also the character of the places they grow. A patient and elegant old tree, and so its brief season of silliness and youth is a rare treasure.

The two of us never had a morning outside and alone. I never witnessed the glory of her bare shoulders in the dappled shade, knee-high in soft and whispering grass, though I can see, in my mind's eye, her expression dubious and full of the wry and half-admitted, understated excitement I have seen in it so many times in other contexts. I never lay my cheek against her shoulder and then against earth and bark.

It is summer now, and in my heart and on my skin I can feel the coming of autumn. The same oak trees that so inspired my opened and vulnerable heart that singular morning are solid and careful in the identity of their prime, their thick, hard leaves expansive and aloof. Pillars of the world, these trees, seemingly unchanging, year to year. What would we do without them?

She and I have known one another a long time, and if you could cut me open and saw me into pieces, I think, you would find my growth rings inexorably marked by the presence of her. As clear as the patterns effected by sun and rain and earth and predation, storm and loss and bounty, are a few singular people, and she is one. But I would not be oak wood; I am a softer thing and less unmoving. I occupy a different habitat. And I am not yet felled.

Our spring was brief; little needs to be said, beyond that. The trees will mast and the leaves curl and fall soon, baring the unmoving structure for its season of minimalist beauty. Then the spring will come again, and I will think of her in fondness and sorrow and love. Another ring will begin to embrace that singular marking.

The world gives us apt metaphors. Or perhaps it is that one can see the metaphors by living in the world, and it is enough that we live, keep living in the turning of seasons.