Another American Adventure: the last snow (continued)

Thursday, March 24, 2011

the last snow (continued)

I spoke too soon. There is the slightest dusting of snow on everything this morning.

4 comments:

BarbaraMarch 24, 2011 at 2:08 PM
Is that a robin I see in one photo? Friends tell me that they have seen robins and cardinals already. We had a dusting of snow today, too. One of the last throes of winter.
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beth cioffolettiMarch 24, 2011 at 4:52 PM
That IS a robin, Barbara. Many fat ones around. I'm not sure why they look so fat. Haven't seen a cardinal yet. And most all of the trees have the faintest of budding happening. Quite exciting to see.
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Sally ClayMarch 25, 2011 at 3:58 AM
Those are particularly neat photos. I love the fat robin and the single leaf.
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beth cioffolettiMarch 25, 2011 at 4:09 AM
thanks, Sally!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.