Finding Frost Flowers

It was a typical crisp blue morning walk, November 18, with Curtis in high spirits and me following his lead. I love how his bells give a Doppler effect as he comes tearing by like a tiger train. 

 I never know where we'll end up on beautiful mornings like this. We often end up in strange places on gray mornings, too. 

It was a rare morning with the temperature around 28 degrees in this beautiful, protracted autumn. I was drawn down a trail I've recently re-opened, one I last cut when Phoebe was in a backpack on my back! I remember swinging the boltcutter style clippers as her sweet drowsy weight shifted from side to side. I was a pack mule then, and I still work like one. I have this idea that I'm going to cut trails to all my favorite places on our land. It's rather a big job, but oh what a delight it is to be able to walk without getting whipped and snagged! I'll git 'r' dun!! The trick is taking tiny bites of the 1,000 pound pumpkin,  not trying to eat it all at once. 

We came out into a badly overgrown gasline cut and my eye was drawn to white structures in the weeds.

First I saw one

and another, and another...

and it's fitting that this one is shaped like a heart, because I love love love finding these little things on a frosty morning!

Frost flowers! FROST FLOWERS!!

blooming only when the nights dip into the 20's (Fahrenheit)

followed by bright sun (or not, as I think about it; I don't think the sun has much to do with it, except that sudden dips of temperature like that generally are followed by bright sunny mornings)

The best ones look like ribbon candy. Far as I can figure out, frost flowers form when very cold temperatures shatter the cells in a still-moist plant stem, creating thin fissures through which water and

sap ooze. The liquid freezes as it is extruded, and the plant just keeps taking up water, probably through capillary action, because at that point, like the Wicked Witch, it's not only merely dead; it's really most sincerely dead. 

Now, I've seen people claim that the only plant that makes frost flowers is wingstem Actinomeris alternifolia, and I've seen them on wingstem, but I've also seen them on asters. And these were a first for me, because they were all on pennyroyal Hedeoma pulegioides! (Update: Nope, this is American Dittany, Cunila origanoides)

This is Ditanny,  after frost, of course. It smells divine, even then. A very potent inhabitant of dry  clearings. 

My father Dale Z. called it pennyroyal, and pronounced it "PENnaroyal" and, as was his way, sought out herbal drops containing it, many decades before that was considered a cool thing to do.  He was fascinated with horehound, too! My dad, man. What a guy. So I knew the smell of "pennaroyal" somewhere in my bones, knew that's what it had to be the first time I ran into it in this clearing back in about 1993. "Huh!" I sez to meself. "That must be pennaroyal!" And I was close, but it's dittany.

 I'm so curious now, to know what makes a plant eligible to produce frost flowers. Wingstem and asters are composites, but dittany is a mint. I looked and couldn't find frost flowers on anything but pennyroyal in this clearing. More data needed. More data is always needed.

Frost flowers, to be quite honest, look at first glance like Styrofoam packing peanuts scattered in the leaf litter, and I'm sure many people don't even think twice to wonder what they are when they see them, but do please think twice, and get down and admire them before they're gone.

The best ones look like ribbon candy, spun silk. You have to get down on all fours to shoot them properly, on elbows and stomach to shoot them best

and I am happy to say that I am still vulnerable to dog bombing while trying to make photos of them.

This dog is not as liable to step on my subjects as the first one was, but like The Bacon, he seems to linger in the background longer than might be expected or even proper

and what are the chances that a photographer would end up with two dogs in a row who are terrible camera hogs

who know exactly what they're doing and even leer a bit as they zip through my careful compositions

two dogs who are shameless, deliberate photobombers

unless that first little photobomber somehow arranged to have another sent my way

or perhaps is coaching him from his pile of fleecy blankies inside a Dogburger of softness in the Great Beyond?

It's thoughts like this that flit through my mind when certain dogs do certain things that fill me with joy 

and make me wonder if somebody somewhere is pulling strings so I won't miss him so terribly on those cold crispy mornings that Chet, having practically no fur on his undercarriage, wasn't so keen on

the mornings Curtis loves like I do.

Young's Jersey Dairy

A potent legacy from my father Dale Zickefoose is my penchant for roadfood. Not burgers and fries, but real cooking with local foods and especially small local creameries. He was in absolute heaven at the ice cream counter of a store attached right to the dairy where the cream was processed. If they had black raspberry or black walnut ice cream, they made his day, his week, his month. All the better if you could smell the cow manure in the parking lot. He was a farm boy and loved that smell. Got that gene!

Why, I believe he's eating ice cream. What do you know. Photo by Larry Fitch.

Dad ate local way before it was cool. He'd take us on road trips just to go to a little restaurant he'd ferreted out, and he'd order the weirdest thing on the menu. Not having heard of a dish was his signal to try it. I got that entire complex of genes from Dad. His food pilgrimages with the family in tow are some of my fondest childhood memories--slurping peanut soup and eating peanut pie in Surrey, Virginia, for instance. He loved a restaurant that had sweetbreads on the menu. Don't even ask. Click if you must.

Note that the statue actually depicts a Jersey cow. It is not a Holstein painted brown. I liked that. And of course I bought their homemade cheese, and it is excellent.

So, on my first trip to this part of Ohio, when I exited Interstate 70 and found this sign on Route 68 heading into Yellow Springs, it was all I could do not to slam on the brakes and stop right then and there. I went into town, met my contacts, and informed them that one thing I meant to make time to do before I left was to patronize Young's, a request my hosts happily fulfilled. I am not a diva, I explained, but there are some things I simply must demand.

I walked in and stopped before the extensive ice cream flavor menu. It was meant to be: they had Black Walnut. I ordered it for Dad, and I swear I could feel him smiling down as I devoured it.
Two of my favorite things: my little Forester, and a black walnut ice cream in a waffle cone. It was beyond delicious, Jersey rich, Jersey smooth, subtly infused with the purple notes of black walnut, with fresh little chunks of nut throughout.

On this latest trip, I made two stops there, one each day. I fought with myself a bit the last morning when I was leaving to head for Cedar Bog. Should I really have an ice cream cone at 10:30 AM?

When and where was I going to get another black walnut waffle cone made from local Jersey milk?

Carpe cream! Ice cream for breakfast!

I was the only ice cream customer. The scooper people were still tying on their aprons. I decided to give them a chance to get ready, so I watched the Cone Man making the day's waffle cones. Look closely and you can see the scoopergirl heading toward me with my second black walnut cone of the trip.

WaffleMan was pouring waffle batter into the irons when I snuck up on him.


I chatted him up (another of Dad's genes that I seem to have happily inherited) and learned that the waffle batter comes powdered from another Ohio institution, Graeter's in Columbus. Oh, good. No wonder those cones were so delectable. And fresh!

He'd take the newly baked waffle from its griddle while it was still floppy and pliable


roll it onto a forming cone

let it cool for a little bit on the metal cone,

and then remove it and place it in a rack to crisp up.

They are just perfect, not crackly crumbly; just chewy enough to stay together, ever so slightly salty, and suffused with vanilla extract. He makes about 6-700 cones a day in high summer.

Mine was Number One.

A Tale of Two Granddaughters

The Zickefooses, circa 1976. Dad is looking pretty pleased with his brood, there on the far right. That's your blogger as a college freshman, right next to Dale. Now, I look more like my mom (plaid jacket) than I do me!

If you like the stories I tell on this blog, I would like you to know that I am only partly responsible for them. I owe whatever storytelling chops I have to my father, Dale Zickefoose. Dad grew up along the Skunk River in southeast Iowa. He was born in 1912. He could tell stories from pioneer days as if he'd been there, so keen was his love of the language and his joy in passing them along. They run through my head sometimes at night. The Cemetery on Pansy Hill. Diphtheria Wallpaper. The Murdering Benders. Ol' Cinnamon the Kicking Cow. Looking for Owl Gizzards. And of course, The Pittard Series. When Dad was a kid, their neighbors in Iowa were an... unusual family with their own language, which Dad's family managed to decode, and then incorporated into their legend and lexicon. You can imagine how much we loved stories about the Pittards, and begged Dad to tell them in Pittard-speak.

My dad enjoyed tinkering with antique gasoline engines, and he loved growing things. He also loved chocolate, nuts, dried figs and buttermilk. (Hey, me too!) But he really, really loved his grandchildren. The two who got to see the most of him when they were little were my sister Nancy's girls, Courtney and Christy. Nancy and her family lived outside Charlottesville, Virginia when the girls were little, and they came into Richmond frequently enough so that my folks got to watch them grow up. Oh, how Dad loved those little girls.
Courtney is the blonde. Christy is wearing a scowl, perhaps related to the two band-aids on her knees, or the Rice Krispie treat she's palming.

Those little girls are all grown up now. Courtney works as an editor for Norton. She just got married in August '07. You may remember her luminosity from a previous post.
Chris is a world traveler, linguist, and perhaps one of the most socially conscious people I've known.
How I wish Dad could have lived to see them grow and flower, but Dad died in 1994 from lymphoma, a bad, bad case of it. He made it to our wedding here in Ohio in September, 1993; got to see our new place in the country, returned to Virginia, went straight into the hospital, and died seven months later. He never knew Phoebe or Liam, missed them clean. But he knew Courtney and Christy.

These two beautiful young people decided to do something to honor my dad, their grandfather. First Chris, and then Courtney started training to run marathons a number of months ago. (Christy dared Courtney to join her.) On January 13, 2008, they'll be running a full marathon in Phoenix, Arizona, to raise money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. In order to train for the 26.2 mile-trek, they're running four days a week and cross-training one to two days a week. Courtney's averaging a ten-minute mile on the longer runs, and her goal is to finish the race in 5 hours or less. She's pledged to raise $3,800 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

As you know, I don't often--read: never--use my blog as a platform for causes, worthy or otherwise, and I don't solicit from my gentle readers. But this thing moves me. These young women have essentially turned over all their free time and the strength of their bodies to making the world a better place for leukemia and lymphoma patients, and I have to honor and salute them. If you'd like to add a little to the cause (100% tax-deductible, I'd add), click here.