The trees in our neighborhood are full of buds, but there are no leaves yet. In the various angles of each day's light, they have a startling beauty.

As Mary Jean Irion writes, "there is honesty in the starkness of a winter tree. Stripped of all pretense and embellishment, nothing is there but the tree's own truth. Before the eyes of all it lives the way it is--nothing more. In its utter, exposed openness it is a kind of prayer."