On a Late Winter Day

 Shila and I had been planning to get out for a hike one mid- February afternoon, but it was so gray and dreary that we slogged away at cleaning our respective houses instead.  Hours after we'd decided to scratch the hike, I saw a broken sky coming and called her. "We've got a broken sky. Not much light left. Let's just get out and drive around and look at clouds, cover maximum territory."

She was up for that! She raced up from town and we piled into my Subaru with Chetty. We sought out several dirt roads that I'd been driving by for a couple of decades and had always wondered about. I wanted to find out how they all connected. 

The first one we took led to a fabulous dairy farm. I have since learned from helpful Facebook friends that the white bags that I had surmised might contain spare rainclouds, saved for a dry summer day, actually have silage or haylage inside, fermenting away for the cattle to eat. I prefer to think of them as cloud storage, so I will.

 Instead of fretting that they were spoiling my photos, I decided to love the giant white plastic bags. They sure looked cool in this panorama. Please click on it to embiggen.

Shila and Chet and I lingered as long as we could in a small German churchyard, where the stones were all auf Deutsch. 

The clouds stuck together, the wind turned sharp and the temperature plummeted. We had barely worn enough clothes. I love these hands and the fonts on this stone. Also, this is a classic Chet Baker photobomb. Does he see dead people? 

 The font and the image on this monument get me.  GATES AJAR GONE HOME. They remind me of my new friend Bobby Rosenstock's amazing work at Just A Jar Design Press here in Marietta.

We fled from the biting wind and gloomy skies of the German cemetery, turning onto a very strange road, knowing not where we'd end up. As I drove, the terrain began to look familiar. "I think I know where I am!" I said.  Sugar Run...the name was so familiar, I'd seen it before, so I knew it would come out on a road I drive. Sure enough, we came out at a bizarre backwater of trailers, shanties and outbuildings where, as far as I can tell, large numbers of junked cars are generated to be spread for miles through the surrounding countryside. Geesh! We broke out onto some familiar rolling hills and the sun did, too. We had trees to visit in the last light of day. 

I have long since fallen in love with this row of white ashes, only to find them losing their bark this winter. Emerald ash borers are devastating our forest. Hey why not? Everybody else is. So, knowing these ashes are doomed, I take their portraits at every turn, because they will probably be gone a year from now. I call them the Samba Dancers. I particularly love the one who leans way out over the road, shaking her thing. All good things must pass, I'm told.

Just up the hill from them is my wee sassafras, the one who reaches and reaches without finding anything to stop her questing twig-fingers.

That crazy branch starting at the middle of the right side of the trunk and meandering its way into the sky makes me smile every time I see it. The other branches lean away from it as if they know it's crazy, and maybe a bit dangerous. It seems not to care that it could soon spoil the proportions and outlines of its mother tree. That branch is going for it.

The sun peeked out from behind its cloud-curtain and slammed golden light into the scene, throwing some branches into relief. I realized, looking at them from another angle, that the two branches on the lower right were going a bit wacky, too. That whole tree has got it going on. That sassafras is feeling itself.

Stepping closer, I looked over the hill and found a new scene beyond the little tree. 

I'm going to walk back there someday, see where it goes. 

How lucky can you get, to be able to seek out such landscapes whenever you please?

Just down the road is my Cold Mountain sassafras.  The scene looks like something from Antietam to me. A place where the rifle balls flew so thick and fast that what few trees remained standing had their branches blown off. It's timeless.

I love it in every light. Big clouds coming up behind, well, that's fine, too. 

Shila and I shot cloudscapes all the way home. There's another Civil War scene on our road, but this time the big oak belongs to us. That's a good feeling, to know that nobody's going to cut that tree but you, and you're never, ever going to lay a blade on it. This oak has some interesting branching, too, some lower limbs that are a bit out of proportion to the rest. I think that's what makes it beautiful.

Back home by the mailbox, the best was yet to come. Creamy sunset clouds and more white plastic. Plastic never looked so good, as Hodge has observed.

The light was bouncing from the clouds to the puddle to the plastic and back, and the hayrolls were floating somewhere in the middle of it all.

Another successful photo-expotition had come to its conclusion, by far the best three hours of that February Sunday.

Delft Days: The Aesthetic Workout

The start of last night's run. This is the only road we can use right now. The main road is too busy and dangerous with snow taking up the shoulders, and the dirt roads like ours are still covered with ice. Talk about dangerous.

I'm thankful for this road, every day. It's been my best friend this winter.

I haven't juiced these photos up at all. They are what I saw. LOOK at the shadowblues!!

My dear friend Hodge, who takes me around Cambridge when I'm there, showing me the most wonderful things, wrote a post on her blog, hereswhatiknowsofar, about the blue and the white.  She hadn't yet seen "Mood Indigo," Tuesday's post. We're just in tune, that's all. We notice the same things.

This synergy between dear friends who live ten hours apart by car inspired me to go look for some more blue and white on a beautiful 34-degree evening. Which was just Wednesday evening. Blue sky, which you see a lot in Cambridge ourfaircity MA, is so very rare here in the mid Ohio Valley winter. I treasure it, for winter blues are singular blues. And these blues help me fight those blues. You know the ones.

I took Phoebe and Chet along. Liam has an iffy throat and a sore neck and wanted to rest instead.

It makes me so happy to run with my kids. I can't go out with them without wondering what I'll do when they leave. I wish I could stop wondering that. Dang it.

Running "with" my kids is a misnomer. Phoebe soon left me in the dust, or more properly the grit. Chet likes to run faster, so he went with her. She picked him up every time a car passed. We do that when the snow eats up our road shoulders. Sometimes I do it just to give him a kiss on the brisket. He waits to be picked up, gives a little lurch up into my arms to help.

The more blue and white I saw, the farther behind I fell. "How do you get anything DONE?" Phoebe, my lithe greyhound, asked. "Well, I consider my runs an aesthetic as well as a physical workout. Stopping is part of that."

Which may be why I feel like so much donut batter poured into my clothes right now. I hate being sidelined, but I have to wait until I have asphalt to run on. It's been a long wait. 

I very much appreciate the fact that Phoebe doesn't make fun of me when I swoon over scenes like this. She does, too. But sometimes when Liam's along the temptation is too great and they laugh at me. That's OK. So many folks drive right by scenes like these without stopping to notice, that I figure I have to swoon hard enough for everybody. 

My favorite lane. Oh my gosh. The corduroy mud, the color harmony with the tree and shed. I almost wept. Just leave me here, looking at all this, the blue, the white, the violet, the russet mud. That little combed cloudlet. 

I always find these trees so graceful, the way they lean toward the road and then correct themselves. Oh, excuse me. I'm not supposed to occlude the road. Maybe it's because they've been trimmed back again and again over the years. Or maybe they just know. But they're all doing this little samba, and the snow points it up.

I see my favorite sassafras peeking between them. She always looks like she's waving her wooden hands, hoping to be noticed. 

No worries, cold Sassy. I notice. But for years, I didn't notice her. I've been tending a bluebird box just downslope from her for probably 18 years, and I never noticed this tree until this winter. And now she's a destination for me. I guess I had to come here a few dozen times before it sank in on me how beautiful she is. Before I wondered what she was and walked up the haymeadow to see. Before I started noticing how she shows in every kind of light and weather.

Chet goes snoopin' around the barn foundation 

while Phoebe and I ogle the first calf of spring. So tiny. Hang in there, little Bully. It's supposed to warm up this week. 

You can see the tiny calf in the background. 

We chug toward the car, parked a little more than a mile and a half away. The whole run is a little over 3 miles.

And it all looks different on the way back, as the sun sinks. Swooning again at the pewter sky and the frosted wheat biscuits, the swoop of the guardrail, the delta of clouds, the plunge of the treeline. If there's anything better for one's compositional sense than iPhone photography, I've yet to find it. My compositional muscles are now much firmer than my thighs. I hope to correct that by summer.

Blue on white, Delft days, the aesthetic workout. Hodge, this one's for you. A blue Valentine to my Cambridge muse.

Back to Beauty

I'm still on my rainy Sunday run, looking at things in an upside-down way. And a funny thing happens. I just keep seeing beauty. Chet and I leave the road to tromp down through the woods to see these three beeches, still wearing their party dresses of leaves frozen and bleached. I love how young beeches do that. Wouldn't it be amazing if entire groves of mature beeches hung onto their leaves through the winter? I wonder why young beeches are marescent and old ones aren't.

Because you'll wonder if you haven't heard the word, here's Alphonso Wood in The American Botanist and Florist, 1876.

Marescent. A good word, rarely used. I'm sure we can all think of examples of things that wither without falling off. Heh.

The road stretches out before us. It's a good road. I confess to being a little tired of running it, but I can't go to my usual haunts when it's icy or muddy, because all my usual haunts are on dirt roads, and I have to contend with falling down and washing the dog each time we run if I try those. As it is, I still had to wash him when we got back from this one. Now he smells of vanilla honey baby wash. Mmmmm.

A whitetail cleared a little low, left some belly hair on a barb. Come spring a Carolina chickadee will be the first to take that offering for her nest. 

Another leaf stencil

I've shot this tree and this little lane again and again. Here it is from another angle. 

My beautiful open-grown sassafras, from afar. It's the rightmost tree.

On a slightly more salubrious evening I photographed its exquisite branch structure. 

It's as if it doesn't quite know what to do with itself, growing out in the open. Sassafras is a deep forest and edge tree, usually packed in like a sardine among others, growing up straight and thin and branching only at the top. 

This tree, for all its grandeur, is barely more than 20' tall. It appeals to the bonsai maker in me.

 We run along to a spot just before the German shepherd's house, beyond which we can no longer go. 

And I see a cow grazing. It turns to look at me and makes the most marvelous crooked shape, echoed in the rhombuses of snow and the shed. Oh oh oh. My eyes!

Chet is intrigued by this scene as well. It is a fine moment. My camera is looking up again, and so am I.

 We turn for home. The skies lower, and lower some more. Iceballs from outer space begin pelting us, each one a tiny stinger. Chet lays back his ears and breaks for the car, which is over two miles away. It occurs to me that no good deed (just trying to get a little exercise, for gosh sakes) goes unpunished this winter. Despite all the shuttersnapping, I still have a bit of battery on my phone, and I use the last of it to text Phoebe. " Look outside. At Buck's Gate. Please come save us?"

"On my way!"

We run and the iceballs turn to big smothering wet snowclumps which quickly dampen us. The wind picks up. We run. Soon, the sound of a familiar engine. Chet recognizes the sound of Phoebe's car and joyfully leaps against the door as she rolls to a stop. Mether!! How did Phoebe know to come save us?? He stands on my lap, nose to the heat vent, and heaves a happy sigh. 

 The most beautiful sight of all, our savior and a warm home. 

 By the next morning there would be 9" of snow on it all. Again.

February 3, 2014.

Photography Tip: Get Down!

Back behind the barn, an old tree supports new barbed wire. I know without even looking for the bark that it’s a sassafras. We’ve got a lot of sassies in our woods. They are beloved by pileated woodpeckers for their tendency to go hollow, which was my first tip as to its identity. 

And in those hollow cores invariably dwell carpenter ants, the backbone of the big woodpecker’s diet. In life, they bear navy-blue drupes which feed bluebirds, thrushes, woodpeckers, cardinals, waxwings and doubtless many others. Their mitten-shaped leaves are highly aromatic, smelling of Big Buddy bubble gum when first crushed, segueing into a sweet spicy scent that finally collapses into fresh-cut grass. Their roots, boiled, make a lovely light root beer. I’m not sure the wood is good for much other than woodpeckers, but already the tree has many charms to recommend it.

I know that he has been here recently, the landowner, because of how fresh the cut vegetation still is. And here are the tracks of his tires in the mud.

 Yes, he was here only yesterday afternoon. I suppose one day I’ll run into him. Will I turn away before he sees me? Will I step into the white pines and study him for awhile before deciding? Will I tell him how much this old place means to me? Probably. I think we need to tell people we appreciate them. Places, too.

 

Here’s the welljack for the oil and gas well that once supplied the house with heat and the means to cook. Somebody’s planted crown vetch to cover the scars of the bulldozer that cleared the patch. Nasty plant, crown vetch, but oilguys don’t know or appreciate that. And the Soil Conservation Service is still giving it out to landowners as a quick groundcover. Duh. As a species, we are very slow learners.

Chet and I have enjoyed the farm, and we turn for home as the air begins to warm up. He pauses in the road to sniff a bunch of nascent chicory and I drop down low to capture the road running off over his bat ears. Mmmm. 

The phrase coined by a photographer unknown to me, and gleaned from someone else’s comment on a photo, comes to mind: “Don’t patronize your subject.” So many photos are taken from five feet up. Most people photograph their dogs looking straight down on them, so you get a huge head and a tiny body and no idea what the dog actually looks like. And no sense of how he sees his world. I get down with Chet and try to see him as another dog would see him, and see his world as he does, and he takes on a kind of majesty that is his rightful due.

 The same goes for flowers. A bug’s eye view is ever so much more satisfying, and it has the added bonus of giving you a slice of habitat and sky that really places the plant in space.

So get down on your knees, people, put your cameras on the ground and see how that changes everything.