Another American Adventure: friends down at the canal

Monday, February 13, 2012

friends down at the canal

Jubilee and I walk here in the mornings and most every evening.

And a neighbor's cool tree house ...

2 comments:

BarbaraFebruary 14, 2012 at 2:30 PM
When I see the cranes at the canal (what a lovely place to stroll!), I think of those I saw wading in the waters of the river that deltaed out at Hiroshima. One arm of the delta passed below the hill on which my college was located and I could look down on it from my office window. Cranes are a symbol of long life and fidelity in Japan.
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beth cioffolettiFebruary 14, 2012 at 5:10 PM
This is mating season in S Florida so there is a lot of flapping, preening and crooning going on!
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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.