Another American Adventure: thaw

Saturday, January 7, 2012

thaw

We're in another thaw, with spring-like weather. I'm half expecting to see the trees start to bud! The sledding hill is not getting much action this year. And the ground is VERY wet! But it's nice to be able to go out without hat, gloves and boots. John says it won't last.

2 comments:

BarbaraJanuary 8, 2012 at 6:14 AM
I love your photography, Beth. You have a keen eye for nature and sharing it with all of us. I enjoy your rambings through the woods.
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beth cioffolettiJanuary 8, 2012 at 11:22 AM
thanks, Barbara. I've been a lover of the woods for as long as I can remember.
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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.