Another American Adventure: Summer Foliage

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Summer Foliage

I'm surprised that there don't seem to be as many wildflowers around this summer as there were last.

Jubilee and I usually take a walk in the park in the early morning because it's getting fairly hot during the middle of the day this week, 90s I think. The park is always shady, and very quiet except for the birds.

I'm noticing a berries trying to ripen, and other things going on...

This is as close as I can come to finding wild flowers ...

Mostly I'm noticing the wood and the leaves ...

Sometimes this fallen wood seems so "present" that I have to touch it.

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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.