Another American Adventure: looking for spring

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

looking for spring

A big storm is coming later today, supposedly dumping a few more inches of snow. Jubilee and I took advantage of the morning sun to walk our favorite trail at the park. So far, we have seen nothing but winter there.

We checked by the stream for signs of swamp cabbage. Nothing.

Ice. Water. Leaves. Branches.

But if you look closely at the branches, there are buds! (near the thorns to protect them from the birds?)

It's nice to have a clear, dry road to walk on. For today.

2 comments:

BarbaraMarch 6, 2013 at 5:53 PM
We are missing out on the latest snowstorm. We kept having daily flurries and no sunshine for weeks now. It promises to warm up now (i.e. + temps, for a change!). I refused to wear my boots this afternoon.
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beth cioffolettiMarch 7, 2013 at 4:45 AM
That's what we had been having here - dark flurry days, day after day. And cold. There is so much sun in FL that I welcome the clouds. Now I find myself craving the sun!

What a freedom it will be to wear regular shoes again!
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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.