By WILLOW DELP
“Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning — never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel.”
– Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting
Like most things, it begins in the dirt.
A seed, and then a sapling, and, in the blink of an eye, a towering, flourishing thing; deceptively appearing as verdant and as innocent as any other tree. It blossoms in the warm springtime, inconspicuous aside from its sweet, piney scent, lingering on clothes for just a little too long (until the smell begins to stink.) But otherwise, it is persistent rather than perennial. For now, the evergreen is bound by time, the scent dissipating in the wash, long gone by the blow of the dryer.
As autumn begins to chill into winter, the needles weather the cold: refusing to scarlet like maples, they remain their unflappable, unfailing green. Clinging onto the branches rather than fluttering to the forest floor alongside their bretheren, they mark themselves as determined, resolute. Admirable. But the distinction doesn’t truly sharpen until the temperature dips below zero.
Evergreens watch throughout the bitterest winters: unchanging, unsympathetic. The weather strikes down its peers: thick snow weighs down their branches until they sink, limping underneath the pressure, and eventually succumbing to white blankets of frost. The elm, the oak bow to the winter; they waver, they wilt. But not evergreens — freezing winds shriek through the woods, and while other trees shudder and shed their leaves in fear, nothing changes for the evergreen — watching the world with a tempered stoicisim. The weather is fickle, the seasons are fluid, but the evergreen’s roots curl into the black soil in infancy and remain, unmoving.
For the evergreen, death and life blur together in a haze of green. A static life is bizarre, if not perverse in such a dynamic world. Winter and summer, war and famine: trivial to the evergreen, silent, blooming witnesses to a fragile earth.
If life is change, the evergreen was born dead: a zombie plant that can be felled, but never truly killed. Disease poisons the planet, enveloping all living tenderness in sickening rot — yet one tree remains, unceasing.
When the world ends, the evergreens will be there: lush, and green as ever.
Writer | Willow Delp ’26 | wdelp26@amherst.edu
Editor | Darby Redman ’28 | dredman28@amherst.edu