I went camping this weekend and stepped into coloring pages, where trees outlined in gray had yet to find their color. A painter had visited recently, but the only paint he had was green. He started at the ground, with shoots of sharp green unfurling in lettuce-leaf bundles and dabbled avocado-green covering moss-swathed rocks and lichen-coated tree trunk bottoms.

Streams tucked themselves into the ground like trails of hot caramel in soft ice cream, leaving a path of Candy Land green spattered onto the brown-gray world. The large trees above our heads kept any sign of spring tucked firmly within their thin, gray-tipped branches, but the smaller trees flouted fresh buds fluffing into pom-pom puffs.

Looking at the coloring pages with a zoomed-out lens, I realized how alive the woods were. Brambles, sprouting dark green leaves, covered the ground and smaller pom-pom puffs flecked through the trees like flitting fireflies. Through the straight lines of the uncolored trees, someone had painted outside the lines with a wild, feathered brush.

At night, the treetops played with the wind, tossing it around but hardly letting it fall to us, where we only caught a few, gentle breezes. As the sky softened to gray, it could not match the intense blackness of the trees, sentinels outlined in thin strips of Sharpie whose filigree of branches delved into the endless sky just as its roots dug into the ground.

A fire burned just outside our three-sided shelter, where flaming fingers had gone to sleep in white ash. Blue flame tickled shriveled logs pulsing with streams of orange-red that flowed between the cracks of the burned black and white wood. When the wind fell from the treetops it caught the fire’s smoke and sent it whooshing in sudden swoops, tangling my hair with its smoldered scent.

Everything in the woods was alive and every one of our twig-crunching, rock-kicking footsteps was like a rude hello to a host who had never invited us to stay. Even so, we were welcomed into the half-green coloring pages where we slept under sentinel trees and walked along Candy Land strewn streams and watched so many shades of green erupt from a gray, gray world.

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