Another American Adventure: Back to the park

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Back to the park

The drive was long and through quite a few downpours. The last 25 miles crawled through rain and Pittsburgh traffic and I thought we'd never get here. But we finally arrived. John had a salmon dinner ready for us. He keeps our little "cave" here simple and neat. Life is so much easier and better when I am with John!

Jubilee and I didn't waste much time getting back over to the park this morning. The air is cooler here, and since we don't walk much in Florida (we swim!), it is good to be out walking again. Besides running into a frisbee "hole", Jubilee did pretty well walking along the path without a leash or much eyesight.

It is full summer here now, all the trees are fully green and in their prime.

I am looking for a few good rocks to put in our up and coming Rock Garden in Florida. So many here, and they are so rare (and expensive!) in Florida.

2 comments:

BarbaraJuly 23, 2013 at 1:53 PM
Rocks -- rare and expensive? Do you mean more "decorative" rocks for a rock garden? Is the soil quite different down there?
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beth cioffolettiJuly 23, 2013 at 4:19 PM
just plain old rocks are very rare in Florida, Barbara. Yep, the soil is quite different - it's mostly sand and what you find in it is coral or shell pieces. Then there is "muck" which is the rich black soil of the Everglades - but I don't recall rock in that either. Buying a bag of plain river rock for ground cover is 10x more expensive in FL than in PA.
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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.