Nature's First Green Is Gold

My all time favorite poem comes to mind every spring in May.  We wait and wait and wait for the first green buds to pop open on the aspens and the poplars, heralding the coming of a fast and furious spring.  The golden green color is truly the hardest hue to hold, as soon it will be deep summer green, and as summer progresses and the leaf miners carve their tiny trails in each aspen leaf, they turn a greenish gray color, and finally a different gold, the golden orange of fall is revealed.  New leaves aren't the only things in life that are golden. The first time you do anything is new and vivid and burned into your memory in the best way. 

My first time in Alaska was golden, like a fresh morning touched with golden light.  Every sense was heightened. As I stepped off the train to Denali my nose was filled with the sweet smell of poplars in the spring.  I will forever be brought back to that moment every time I smell poplar buds in May.

My mouth filled with the crisp bite of an apple given to me after a long train ride to my first job in Denali National Park, by someone who would become a dear friend. At that moment I didn’t know what a precious gift fresh fruit was in Denali, but I soon found out that you either had to make the trip on the employee bus to Fairbanks, or wait for the weekly visit of the fruit lady and pay double the already crazy Alaska prices for fruit to get such a precious thing as an apple. What a gift. Later that week the soft wiggly bodies of sled dog puppies filled my arms. And the sights!  I saw mountains and waterfalls, bears and dall sheep up close, Denali rising above the clouds like a spectre that didn't look connected to this earth! The sound that echoes Alaska to me is the sound of sandhill cranes circling above on a thermal, the whirring like 1000 voices cracking and calling at once.  It rings in the springtime and bids farewell in the fall.  The cranes will always have a special place in my heart. 

Alaska's first green is gold.  I was green when I came here, a young woman of only 18.  I was golden, fresh, hopeful and new to all of this beauty and adventure.  Alaska has since become a part of me, as much as the nutrients in the soil are absorbed by those first gold leaves.  The soil of Alaska turned me deep green, fed and nurtured by this incredible open space, beauty, and resources of the land.  And, sometimes, the trails of tears and trials turned that deep luscious green into gray with scars like the leaf miners leave on the aspens.  But all works together for the beauty of the fall colors, and another kind of gold- the gold of experience and time.  My gold is coming full circle just as nature intended.  We never were meant to stay tender and bright green like the springtime.  We were meant to soak it all in, steep in this special place, feed on the resources for soul and body alike, and let Alaska change and transform us into all of the colors of life.

"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."

-Robert Frost Nothing Gold Can Stay