Another American Adventure: still summer

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

still summer

It's still looking very much like summer, even though the mornings can be in the upper 40s or 50s. I don't see any signs of fall in the foliage. Here are some photos from our walks in the park this week ...

2 comments:

BarbaraAugust 31, 2011 at 7:32 PM
It is a bit cooler here. I haven't noticed much leaf turning yet, but you feel the fall approaching. I love the fall!
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beth cioffolettiSeptember 1, 2011 at 7:10 AM
Me too. I don't quite feel it here yet. Dark and rainy here today. Nice.
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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.