Winter

And What's Really Going On

The leaves part ways with the branches and began their gentle sigh toward the ground, tucking the earth in for a restful winter.

Below the ants fire up their subterranean vacuum cleaner, aim it at the sky and flip the switch. It works every year around this time, but there is always a question as to whether this will be the year everything stops running smoothly. It is a delicate piece of machinery. It’s their job to pull all the leaves from the trees to turn them into rugs for the ant condos beneath the grass. No one can quite remember how it got there, but each generation of ant knows how to operate it and passes that knowledge on to their children.

Once flowers and bees do their reproductive waltz, the flowers shed their multicolored coats and stand unadorned and dried out in the garden bed.

Worms dodge birds and rain to pluck colorful petals from the flowers and put together stained glass windows for the tops of their wormholes. This takes some doing as worms are just heads and tails and neither end is super dextrous. It’s totally worth it though, when the sun hits the window just right.

Some smaller trees grow bright red berries as a cheerful feast for birds during the long, cold months.

Trees hate to be bare so, in winter, they put on earrings when no one is looking. But because they don’t have ears, they don’t know when to stop. There’s always a lot more than two per tree, but no one ever complains. A few pine trees went overboard one year and that’s how decorating Christmas trees began.

Starlings dance in murmurations for warmth. Their swooping, fluid formations deceive predators as they gather together to roost through the winter months.

Squirrels invented drone technology centuries before we did, but they didn’t bother telling us because they didn’t think we’d care, and also because they get really distracted by acorns. What humans call ‘starlings’ are actually intricately built drones that are controlled by scores of squirrels. They meet up beforehand and synchronize their drone launches. The squirrels then fly their starling drones in well-choreographed routines. There’s no real reason for this other than it looks cool and they needed something to pass the time until spring returns.