Another American Adventure: men in the trees

Monday, March 4, 2013

men in the trees

The view from our window finally shows some action for Jubilee, who keeps watch most of the day ...

There is some sun today, but it still feels very cold. From our morning walk:

I'm beginning to think that what I thought was swamp cabbage isn't really swamp cabbage at all, just some stagnant green sticking up from the ground. It has shown no growth or any sign of life these last 3 weeks, and there is no other swamp cabbage coming up anywhere.

It is still very much winter around here.

1 comment:

BarbaraMarch 4, 2013 at 1:29 PM
It is Spring Break here in Montreal and the schools are shut down. It is very quiet and many people go away to someplace warmer. Your description sounds a lot like our weather this last while. My boyz stare out the window although, to me, there is nothing to see. Humphie has taken an interest in snow falling lately. Bogey just stares at the wall sometimes. Cabin fever.
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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.