Another American Adventure: leaves, lilies and sunshine

Friday, July 26, 2013

leaves, lilies and sunshine

These days in Western Pennsylvania have been delightfully cool (48 degrees yesterday morning) and mostly sunny. I've yet to make it up to the pool (too cold!), but doing a lot of walking and generally enjoying the weather. It feels like summer without the heat!

I love the way the sunlight filters through the oh-so-green of the trees. Even the dappled shadows dance and delight.

I've been looking at these lilies up by the playground. They too speak of summertime.

I coaxed Jubilee across this bridge today this morning. She is careful where she walks now ...

... down to the fallen tree ...

... where we saw this lovely "weed".

2 comments:

BarbaraJuly 26, 2013 at 12:49 PM
I believe that "weed" is phlox, somehow staking a place for herself in the world.

Lovely photographs. You capture that dappleness so well. I love the first and second photos. <3
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beth cioffolettiJuly 26, 2013 at 1:54 PM
thanks, Barbara! <3 <3 <3
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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.