Before the Canopy Closes

>>Before the Canopy Closes <<

The quiet return of light before the canopy closes

Spring doesn’t show up all at once.

It begins quietly—low to the ground.

Before the dune canopies close above—before the trails and streambeds fill—there’s a brief window where the forest floor opens first. Light reaches places it won’t touch again for months. Ephemerals—spring’s dependable flowers—rise, bloom quickly, and disappear just as fast.

In the Black Oak savannas, along creek beds, and across the old dune ridges, this moment is easy to miss entirely.

But it’s there—every year.

Looking inland from the Cowles Bog beach before leaf-out

Not as spectacle. Not as escape.
But as a kind of renewal that asks nothing from us except that we notice it.

Black Oak savanna — Tolleston Dune Ridge

In a world that feels increasingly fractured, loud, and uncertain, I find myself coming back to these places more deliberately.

Not to get away from anything.

Hazel catkins at Cowles Bog—early spring before leaf-out

But to be reminded that something still holds.

That cycles continue.
That light still finds its way through.
That even the briefest bloom carries its own completeness.

These photographs come from this early window—before leaf-out, before density returns—when structure, color, and time briefly separate and become visible again.

They’re not meant to explain anything.

Only to show what’s there.

Spring Beauty — Cowles Bog