The Winter Tree

Last evening I went for a walk alone down Duke of Gloucester Street.  I like walking alone at night, and it's something I haven't been able to do since I left Williamsburg, really.  I started in Merchant's Square, where the storefronts were all lit with Christmas lights and the whole of the place felt cheery and I could see people eating their dinner through the big glass windows at the Trellis and the Fat Canary and waitresses tended to a few brave souls sitting outside at the new DoG Street Pub.  I crossed the street and walked down past the Armistead House, a 19th-century antebellum home which is now historical in its own right, but which looks so out of place next to all the 18th-century styled buildings.  Then by Bruton Parish which was brightly lit for the Canterbury High Holy Eucharist, and I wished I hadn't arrived too late to go to the start of the service.  Just past there I looked down towards the Governor's Palace and thought of jumping the wall as an undergraduate and working in Foodways and meeting some of my best friends at the orientation they held on the green years ago.  It was cloudy and the reflections off the clouds actually lit up the sky a bit more than the stars would have done, and I looked up and saw a perfectly bare tree silhouetted by the night.  I looked up and down the street and realized that in the past three days or so most of the colorful trees had gone bare or at the least had begun to lose their leaves.  The fall really must be coming to an end, and while that makes me sad, there was something irrepressibly beautiful about this winter bare tree.  A cold wind picked up, and it felt a bit like snow, though of course it was much too warm for snow, and I started imagining hot chocolate and the Christmas wreaths that will soon bedeck every door.