One Evening in June

 Riches. That's the theme as spring turns into summer. My girl is home. My boy is home. They're both here with me, for the summer, though summer will be so very brief; Liam leaves for W. VA University (pronounced Dub VeeYew) on August 11. I'm conscious of treasuring every moment with them both home, for what will likely be the last summer. I don't need anything else, but June...oh June. She keeps throwing things at my feet, draping beauty around my shoulders. I can't begin to take it all in, but oh, I try.

While bending very, very low to try to catch the fragrance of my Firecrest water lily, my flubberroll pushed my trusty faithful iPhone 6 out of the stretchy little Bandi waist pouch I wear around all summer long. It usually keeps my phone and Flipnotes metal notebook safer and more accessible than they'd be in my pockets, but this time there was a wardrobe malfunction. I heard a Ploop! and swiped my hand into the water, catching the phone as it was settling gently on the bottom. Instinctively, I sucked water out of all the ports, raced inside saying, "Phone in pond. Phone in pond. Get rice!" Phoebe leapt into action and we interred the phone in rice for 36 hours. I tried to leave it alone, in state. It was hard. After 24 hours, I fired it up and it seemed OK, then went black. Back into the rice, which helps desiccate soaked electronics.

There ensued a couple of days that, if I'm honest, were entirely devoted to replacing the phone. A 40-minute drive  with Bill, the account holder, to Parkersburg to the ATT store, where I decided to make an insurance claim rather than upgrade. I loved my 6. I didn't need a 7, 8, or a 10. It would be replaced with a 6, and that was fine with me. Waiting for the new phone, I realized what a part of my life it is, and mostly for the camera. I missed it terribly. When a new one arrived, I spent most of a day transferring content from the old one to the new one, and doing all the sweat-inducing password and sign-in gyrations that accompany firing up a new phone. First world problems, all of them. Nothing more than an inconvenience, and a reckoning of just how much having this magic camera/lifeline/access to a world of knowledge means to me. It was a good way to back up (literally and figuratively) and take a look at what's important to me. And what's important to me is staying in touch with my family and friends, and making images.

So when I finally got the new phone up and running, I got myself up and running for an evening light photosafari. I love running in the morning; I feel a bit logy by evening, probably because I work and garden so hard all day that exercising then seems beside the point. But the light and the allure of photography got me out.

 

This is the child of the great red oak who used to grace our mailbox. I love to see it thrive and grow. I love to think of a time when I'll remember when it was just a sapling. I wish I could live long enough to see it get huge, to see it throw shade on the mailbox. I want to sit under it and read the paper.

  

You can't really see them unless you click on this photo, but there's a bluebird on the wire, and the white breast of a redtail shining in the dead tree just beyond. And let's look at those thunderheads. Oh, Summer.

  

I'd been looking for the prints of the first fawn of summer, and this time I found them. So tiny it must be, the size of a cocker spaniel, tottering around after Mama on fingertip-sized hooves.  Ah, June.

The field daisies are out full, finishing up, even. They always surprise me, blooming earlier every year.

Pair them with evening light and you have a poem. I don't care that they came here from Europe. So did we. They're a heavenly host and I love them without reserve.

 

 As you might imagine, I was feeling quite satisfied with the camera on my new iPhone 6. I'm not sure how, but it manages to be even better than the one I tried twice to drown. (I left it out overnight in a thunderstorm once, in the bottom of a laundry basket. That time I dried it out and it was fine.)

A 15-foot tall Honeysuckle Tower of Flower Power. You simply cannot imagine the scent that comes from a cluster of Japanese honeysuckle like that. It is overpowering, and in those concentrations, it takes on a soapy powder-room overtone that actually makes me reel. This Asian import I do not love, but it has its charms. The ruby-throated hummingbirds will have nothing to do with my feeders while this riot is going on, and it's a blessing for the little hens, who have no trouble getting a headily scented meal of nectar while busy feeding their young.

The milkweed is locked, loaded and ready to fire in about a week.

I have seen some good years for Penstemon digitalis or Foxglove penstemon, a gorgeous native member of the Scrophulariaceae. But this year takes the absolute cake. Lots and lots of rain, and somewhat cooler temperatures must be just what it needs to reach its best.

My road is lined with foxglove penstemon. Another hummingbird bounty.

Evening light just makes it glow.

 

The light in the little churchyard was ravishing. That obelisk in the center marks the grave of Nancy Love, and the verse on it goes:

She has gone to the realms of the blest

Where sorrow can reach her never

She has passed through the gates of her rest

She is lost to our dim eyes forever.

Rain Crows fans will recognize these lines. 

 

But the best surprise was yet to come. I've been given permission to trot around on a large piece of land where someone is building a large castle. On my first visit, I was delighted to find a grove of young persimmons, growing up around a mother-tree, topping a grassy hilltop.  That was several years ago. Since then, I've been back many times. I made a point to speak with the landowner and let him know what a treasure he had in that grove. I told him the trees would make bushels of sweet fruit come fall; that they were well worth keeping around. He was all over that; he likes the idea of living off the land. And though he's done a lot of cutting and clearing there, to date he's kept his promise to save the persimmons from destruction. I feel proud of that. It's conservation on a grassroots, landowner by landowner level. Every time I visit, I look at the little grove and smile, thinking that, but for that one conversation, those trees would likely have gone unrecognized for the treasure they are. There is so much work to do.

 This June evening, I walked up as usual, and everything was different. I heard the bees humming as I approached. Hundreds, thousands of bees. The trees were in bloom! PERSIMMON FLOWERS!! Where I could reach them!!

It may sound odd, but I have wanted to see persimmon flowers all my durn life. I have looked for them and have never seen them. Mostly, that's because a persimmon grows to be a very tall tree, and there's no way, even with binoculars, I'd be able to make out its tiny flowers if they were 50' over my head. But these trees were small enough to have some branches at eye level to me. Eureka!! I waded through blackberry and poison ivy to get some photos and revel in the discovery.

Tiny, four-petaled chalices of sweetness they were. You'll notice the black spots on them and all over the leaves. That turns out to be a fungus called anthracnose, and I've never seen a persimmon that didn't have it. It must not compromise them much, and for that I'm grateful.

Though small white flowers are often very fragrant, these were very lightly scented. There was a barely discernible sweet, olivey scent. 

One of my favorite botany gurus, who goes by The Buckeye Botanist on Instagram, commented, "Let me just say that I've admittedly never gotten this close to fresh persimmon flowers like this before either. You got me beat!"

 Life goals!!--to beat Andrew at anything plant-related!

As I thought about it, I realized this might be the first time these trees had ever bloomed. I'm sure I'd have noticed it in past springs. I felt honored, like I was present at their debut, their coming of age party. To some, it might seem like such a small thing, but it made my day.

I stepped back and looked at the grove, and realized I could capture the whole story in one photo. The bulldozer, the persimmons, and far back, the castle under construction.

 

There they were, with the bulldozer that might have taken them down, had I not had the nerve to say something. To try to save a little something special in this bulldozed, built-up, scraped-flat world. 

I'll be back in November, looking for the sweet, squashy, sticky orange fruits. Maybe some will hang low enough for me to photograph and pick them--another first! I'm used to fighting the 'possums and coons for wind-dropped fruit, used to finding nothing but the licked-clean pedicels under the towering trees on our place. It'll be sweet, another one of those full-circle moments that happen when you're in the same place and watching and caring the whole time.

 

Oh, June. Your light, your skies, your flowers. It's all too much, and just exactly what I need.

Woodpecker Tracks and The Principle of Situational Awareness

We're still rambling around in the ice, in the gold, blue and white wonderland. 

Soon I'd climbed so high the Toothless Lady could no longer be seen.

I saw a familiar bird take off from the snowy road, and stepped off the side so I wouldn't obscure its tracks with mine. 

I was talking once with a friend of mine, comparing notes. He said that if he were on a first date and she walked over tracks he was looking at, that would be it. It would be over, just like that. I still chuckle thinking about it.

I laughed and said the same would be true for me. If you're walking with me, don't be stomping over tracks.  When I see tracks, I stop and immediately jump off the trail so as not to spoil them. Because who knows what story is written in the snow or mud? 

Walking over a story like this is like trampling a book.

I was very pleased to find these tracks, the first such I'd seen. You might notice they are odd, long-toed, and zygodactyl. Two toes pointing front, two toes pointing back. These are yellow-shafted flicker tracks!! 

Flicker tracks are very hard to find and harder to photograph because flickers are almost always foraging in grass. They look for anthills to plunder. They do not frequent mud puddles, unless they're drinking. And a flicker on the ground in the snow is pretty rare.

Wild turkey and white-tailed deer tracks, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. But a tableau with wild turkey, white-tailed deer and flicker tracks is a rare one indeed. You can see that the flicker hops. His tracks are paired and there are gaps between them.

A huge part of the concept of situational awareness is being able to appreciate when you've found something cool, maybe unrepeatable. You keep a catalogue of the things you've experienced in your head, and you run through it when you find something novel. Nope, never seen that before. That's cool! You note the moment. You savor it. A juxtaposition like this can make your day, if you're situationally aware. Let's all strive to be more situationally aware! As you will see, it took awhile for the true import of these woodpecker tracks to sink in on me. I was distracted by the light.

I hurried onward. There were white pines to admire, pines festooned in crystal.

Come on, sun. Hit these pines for me. 

Multiflora rose and dead pine, dignified by an icy case.

Bam. Thank you. 

A sentinel oil derrick, stilled for now, backed by glistening pines.  Like a giant drinking bird, about to plunge.

I hurried to the allee of pines in the dying light.  Slashes of low sun fell across. I didn't have time to walk it. I stopped, smiling as I remembered hugging Chet the last time we were here in the snow. He had his little red jacket on. 

I felt his presence with me. I just wished I could touch him, smell his not-so-great breath, and his honey-scented ears. 

There were a few dying rays, and I meant to catch them. No time to mull.

The sun illuminated the old barn and I knew there would be good light below.

I hurried to the lower level, where the cows once lived.

Today, the dark wood, slashed with warm sun, framed a stunning fairy world just outside. I don't expect to see something like this again. Note to self: Head to back barn in next ice storm.

Oh I hated to leave. But I had to catch the sunset, going on outside.

The old house stands stoically even as it falls apart.

I whipped around the corner to catch another image of the abandoned couch. There are a few things about this image I want to bring to your attention. First, snow on a couch.  There's that. Second, the gray cloud  shadow that looks like smoke, curling out of a chimney that probably hasn't known a flame for 50 years. Third, the poison ivy vine fuzzing the chimney's outlines, so it looks like the photo is out of focus. It's all so wonderful.

Ah, the dying of the light. I hurried out the road, which is really a driveway for the farmstead. My tracks coming in are happy, wandering, toe-out tracks. My tracks going out are straight, far apart, hurrytothelight tracks.

A white-throated sparrow surprised me by popping up out of the shrubbery and sitting for a few moments, backlit. Oh my. Oh my my my. I shot as long as he granted me the honor. Since this photo was taken, they've started to sing their quavering Poor Sam Peabody song from the thickets as night falls. I love hearing them sing before they head north to the sweet scented balsam fir forests of Canada.  Singing over the woodcock's peents and twitters...it's divine.

Oh! turkey tracks! Must capture. I trotted along the side of the road so as not to compromise them.

When I got back to the spot, I studied the flicker tracks again, and wondered what the woodpecker was doing in the road. I studied the patterns. The tracks concentrated around holes in the gravel. In those holes were halved hickory nuts!

The flicker was using the frozen soil as a vise with which to secure hickory nuts for pounding open. 

In each hole was a halved hickory nut with the meat gone. Well doesn't that beat all?

Not only had I found my first flicker tracks, but I learned something too. 

There were two hairy woodpeckers under the hickory, as well, so some of these could be hairy woodpecker tracks. Again, I've never found those. 

Woodpecker tracks, like hummingbird tracks, are hard to photograph. It takes a special situation like this. It occurred to me that the deer and turkey tracks were there for a reason, too. Everyone was sniffing out the nuts from this one tree. This photo was taken about a week later, when everything had melted off. I haven't had a chance to figure out what kind of hickory it is, but the bark didn't look loose or curly enough for shagbark. Standing all alone there, it's a great big feeder for wildlife. I love knowing that. 

Here's the hickory, a photo from a couple days later. It's a living, growing wildlife feeder. 

I'll try to key it out one of these days.

I kept moving down the road, running toward the sunset. A forgotten hayroll wound up in the woods. I wondered how it had gotten there. Had it rolled down on its own? Did she jump or was she pushed?

Ahead of me, the snowy road.

And The Toothless Lady in the dying light, backed by lavender and cream clouds.  Another light painting, another unrepeatable scene.

Beside me, the unmistakable profile of Sasquatch. What else could it be? When I'm out in the countryside, I'm always Squatchin'. 

For your information, the pendulous butt of Sasquatch might just be a Canon 7D with telephoto. I've no explanation for the pointy head.

I kept an eye on the back sunset

and the lovely frieze of clouds and trees along the haymeadow

until I broke out on the county road and could see the main stage.

Had to hurry to the Shadow Barn to see what the light was doing there!

Might as well pay the Three Graces homage on my way home. 

Another highly successful excursion,  costing nothing. Powered by light, curiosity, situational awareness, and the endless quest for beauty. 

To recap: Look down a lot. Go out in new snow or new mud, after a rain. Make a habit of preserving tracks. Don't be walkin' on tracks. Follow them instead. Try not to let a track go unidentified. 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a field guide to animal tracks. A classic by the legendary Olas Murie, newly updated (I use the original). Treat yourself. 

Stay alert to the cool stuff. Celebrate when you find something new. Let it make your day. 

WOODPECKER TRACKS JUST SAYIN' WOOT!!

I believe that about covers it. Thanks, as always, for walking with me.