Another American Adventure: Green

Friday, May 13, 2011

Green

This is how green things have become over at Knob Hill Park (and everywhere else too).

The forest floor is covered with the skunk cabbage and the plants that look like umbrellas.

2 comments:

BarbaraMay 13, 2011 at 11:50 AM
Beth, your wonder at the unfolding spring has made my own spring up here more delightful. I heard people comment that we are two weeks behind schedule here -- the crabapples are not yet in bloom. Love that rich green! Watch as it darkens through the summer months.
ReplyDelete
Replies
beth cioffolettiMay 13, 2011 at 1:37 PM
I've loved every minute of it, Barbara.

I may be heading back to FL in a couple of weeks. Not sure when I'll get back up here, but it could be by late summer.

So interesting, this life of moving back and forth to 2 completely different climates.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

"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.