Clammy Groundcherries, Everted Opossums, and Art

I go on to the second barn, but find it full of honest machinery. It's a better barn with a better roof. I guess I like the skeevy one better. It tells more stories. 

I go a bit farther beyond the second barn and see a huuuge whitetail buck in the hidden meadow.

It's interesting how I have come to be able to tell a buck from a doe, naked eye, at such a distance. To judge the relative size of an animal that, through my iPhone, is but a dot, and know that it's really large, or at least larger than a doe would be. And darker. Bucks tend to be darker and bluer than does in fall.

 I long for my telephoto lens. I can count ten points on his antlers through my pocket Swarovski binoculars. 

Busted, he takes off. Wish I could do better than this, but I can't run with a 70-300 telephoto weighing about 8 lb. You can just make out the bone-white tips of the tree of antlers on his head.

Hope he made it through gun, bow, youth and muzzleloader seasons. Oh, and the three-day December shootin' spree. 

Chet and I move on down the road, noting a very nice patch of wild ginger still showing yellow- green! I hadn't known the leaves persisted so long into November. 

At the point on this beautiful road where I can see the little church, I always start to sing "Little Brown Church in the Vale," one of the songs my dad would sing as he took my mom, my sister Micky and me on long drives into the Virginia countryside when we were kids. 

Oh how I loved when he would sing. He could carry a tune, but his rhythm was a little off. It drove my mom crazy. Dale! You skipped two measures!

Of course we all sang along. Micky was really good at harmony.

I strove to be as good as she was.

She also drew better than I did.

Consider these things, how having a talented older sibling can burn a hole in the younger, less gifted one, make her long to excel.

My father knew about that.

It occurred to me as I uploaded these photos that I have never crossed the creek to snoop about in this church. For one thing, it looks like it's locked up tight. 

But maybe it's not. 

Shiver of delight if not.

Big disappointment if so.

I think that's why I haven't tried.

In such a public place my guess is it will be locked and barred. 

I'll get back to you on that.

It sits, a little jewel in the landscape. This spring I will go and see what's blooming around it, 

even if I can't get inside to sing and dream.

In November,  the damp bank of the stream was full of clammy groundcherries, Physalis heterophylla. 

I became enchanted by these members of the nightshade family. 

They were so similar to the tomatillos I'd grown all summer (which I adore; like a crisp, citrusy tomato!) that I wondered if they were edible.

Sites differ on that point. This one (Ohio Perennial and Biennial Weed Guide) states that the plant and unripe fruit are toxic. Yikes. Let me quote them directly: 

 Leaves and unripe fruits of groundcherries are poisonous and even fatal if ingested by humans. However, ripe fruits are not as toxic and can be made into jellies, jams, and sauces. 

Now, would you eat something that was described as "not as toxic?"

Pfft.

Me neither.

I'll settle for admiring their beauty. Don't miss the church, behind...

Ooh, ahh.

I'm going to try one next time I find them. Ain't skeert.

Speaking of not being skeert, I found an unfortunate animal. Do you recognize this foot?

Yes, that is an (almost) opposable thumb. But this animal has not developed an alphabet, 

nor learnt to grow grain.

Still, it is a marvelous foot.

We have not many truly scaly animal tails. By now, you have guessed whose foot that is, no?

If you are easily grossed out, you may want to put your hand over this next photo. I will tell you that this is what a turkey vulture does when it processes a Virginia opossum. Or a raccoon, or a cat or a groundhog. It turns it completely inside out, leaving only a head and the skin, the spine everted, and all the tasty bits gone.

 Which, if you're a Science chimp, you love, even as you gag a little.

Ready?

here it comes

 So now you  (gag) know. I took the color saturation down a bit.

 It helped.

Sometimes I wonder, if I were some big-deal photographer with a New York gallery show, if I put a huge print of a photo like that up on a well-lit white wall, with a label that said

Requiem: Didelphis

and there were long tables of wine and cheese and some helter-skelter jazz trio playing, would skinny young people in heavy horn-rimmed glasses and long black coats assume they were missing some Greek literary reference they really ought to know, gather around and speak in low tones of the immense loft of my artistry?

Then I trot on

behind my little black dog

who remembers where we parked.

Just below the tiny community hall where he inspected the privacy booths, and we'd voted, first thing that November morning.

Other People's Stuff

I'm snooping in other people's barns on an early November six-mile run near my home. Around here, very few barns actually house animals any more. Some of them still shelter hay, but most of them are just big airy storage units for stuff that nobody wants any more. 

Which makes them crack for me, who used to haunt flea markets and tag sales back in the days when I still thought I needed stuff. Now, I drive by yard sales with a steely resolve not to be dragged in.

I'm already thinking about how much crap I have, and what I'm going to do with it all when I can't deal with it any more. A person with a lot of interests (art, music, natural history, books, science, horticulture, aquariums, batkeeping, specimen prep to name just a few) accumulates a LOT of crap in half a lifetime.

So I love to look at other people's stuff. Everything in this post is in the near barn with the silver roof, and the half a satellite deesh poking out of the carriage space. See photo above.

 Mmm. Beautiful blue Mason jar, nice limited palette composition.

A box of rags, and a robin's nest that must've fallen from a beam above. 

More jars and some gas pipeline, and some great Wyethian milkhouse light at the end of the corn crib.

A very large hole, with bedding. Could be woodchuck, probably is. But could be the work of a rat, too. Rats live pretty large for their size. 

I couldn't find any telltale hairs.

Mousestuff. Oh, don't worry. I will definitely remove the lids before microwaving.

Mice love jars. So do Carolina wrens! Oh my, what a place for a nest. Couldn't tell if the fledglings made it or not. Carolina wrens are such neat housekeepers there's rarely ever a telltale poop left behind.

This was a cool find: a whole box full of tape dispensers? Huh?

The white-footed mice have been opening hickory nuts here.

 Hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran up the tape dispenser.

The tape theme would continue upstairs. I was drawn by curiosity up the Stairway of Poop.

If you know raccoons, you know they love to poop on things. Preferably stairs, where your foot is about to go.

And at the top of stairs. Eating persimmons, I see. Me, too. Only I remove the seeds at the upper end of my alimentary tract, thank you.

At the top of the stairs, a sort of living room, one Vermeer would have liked to paint, if he liked junky interiors. An elegant wing chair, full of some kind of video games. Shazzam! I'd been hoping they were eight-track tapes. That would have been amusing, to go through the titles. But video games mean nothing to me. It's like looking at runes.

Absolutely love the lighting here. Yum.

Yes, I find these scenes compellingly creepy. Especially when I get the feeling people have been, um, doing stuff up here, amidst the animal droppings.

 A little privacy, please. Why would you need a curtain in the upstairs of a barn...? To try on clothes? Oh, never mind. Ishta. Uffda.

The mind does go places. Sometimes comes a bit unhinged.

The runes never speak.

Outside, the beeches whisper of Lothlorien, of a cleaner, more wholesome place, a place where I belong. And on I trot.

Rural Light, Rural Shadow

Scrolling through photos for the last post, I came upon a forgotten photo safari. The images were too beautiful to let them die in my library. So here's a little flashback to the lush beauty of early November along an Appalachian Ohio run.

On Voting Day, November 4, Chet and Bill and I went early to our tiny community hall in Dalzell to vote.

We were the sixth and seventh people through the door, and probably the first and last Boston terrier of the day. (He had to inspect the booths, meet and greet).

It being a very cold and damp but sunny morning, I decided to run a nearby road as far as I could, then turn around and come back. Which turned out to be three miles out, three back.

It was BEAUTIFUL and I was so glad to be out, even though it was terribly damp and cold down along 15 Mile Creek and I had not remembered gloves. I think I finally warmed up around Mile 4.

Two hundred fifty

Waxwings trill and coalesce.

Pileated yaks.

Hermit thrush whispers

Rings silver bells in my soul.

A perfect morning

on a dirt road near town hall.

We blackened ovals.

The light being perfect and golden and the morning shadows being long, the photos came out well.

There are a couple of ways to see this: A cross commemorating an accident where a child perhaps died, or a panda crucifixion. Either way it's an odd image. I'm sure I could get the story if I half tried. Just have to talk to the right people.

 How would this barn look painted red? Let's see. Slap some paint on her...

Along the roadside, the witch hazel was in bloom, sending out a scent like freshly printed mimeo paper. I'm glad I remember what that smelled like, when the teacher would bring the purple-blue tests, still wet and cold from the printer, and we'd smash the paper against our noses and huff the smell. That was the nice part about taking tests in elementary school.

I have gotten in the habit of sticking my iPhone up to cracks in barns, to see what's inside. I love the patterns, the light, the mystery of it all. These are scenes I can't see with my big ol' eye. The cracks are too small.

Egad, the shadow of this simple chain and padlock.

Long winter shadows

Old rough boards...may they never

cease to fascinate!

One thing we've got here

is long winter shadows and

old rough boards. Plenty.

Chet sniffs out mysteries of his own. His coat shines like burnished iron.

This is a good good road. We should take new roads more often.

These cobwebs were blowing back and forth in the draft coming into the barn, giving them a wonderful blur of motion.

What's inside? Do you see a gently smiling gorilla face? Mona Lisa Gorilla?

The interior.  

So many lines and rectangles.

Virginia creeper makes crazy caterpillar shadows.

It's one of those mornings when I'm finding little paintings everywhere I look.

This is a hideous exotic Miscanthus grass that I kill wherever I find it on our land. Not everyone shares my abhorrence of it; some of my neighbors dig it up and plant it in their yards because they think it's pretty. Knock yourself out. Before long that's all you'll have in your yard. And you might try to walk through a stand of it before you decide to plant it. Your funeral.

I never see a house like this, standing patient and abandoned, but I want to move in and write a book there, mice and musty air and all. I come to these little roads to move my old bones, to dream.