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.

Talking to the Neighbors

As I continue to recover from surgery and shingles, feeling around to find my strength and wellness again, I'm slowly upping my hours and miles back to something that feels normal. I try to surpass 10,000 steps per day. It feels so good to cover some ground again. I'm not sure when running is going to feel right again. Hoping it will. Ankles hurt all the time. Not sure what that's about.

For now, I'm in hiking boots, slogging through mud and over tussocks.

If the morning is fair, which it all too rarely is, I hurry out to catch the sunrise. 

I can never capture it to my satisfaction, but trying is fun. There's the corner oak that marks the east 40 on our property. 

If I capture the land, the clouds suffer. 

If I capture the clouds, the land suffers. Still, digital phone cameras are worlds better than my little film Pentax and Canon AE-1 used to be. Dawn's always a challenge. 

On my way out to the sunrise I stop to see Ellen, or what's left of her. She's still lying in the field where the coy-wolves dragged her, the same one where she fell. Just a ribcage, a spine, a leg and a hoof. 

She'll be gone with the first hay cut, just some hard bits of bone in a hayroll somewhere.

This is why I need Buffy, Flag and Pinky. I need them like I need breakfast and hot tea.

I need these wide landscapes and softly smiling skies.

And oh, I need the sun, the shadows. It's been behind gray blankets for far too long. My friend Scott called them "dryer lint skies." Just about as inspiring as dryer lint, too.

But on a sunny morning, well, anything's possible. My brain works a lot better.

The base of an oak reminds me of a mountain slope with trees creeping up to timberline. You look at a distant mountain in the West, and you can't believe how tiny the huge trees look, straggling up its flanks. You try to imagine walking out there. That's what this oak bole brought to mind.

The bark of another oak, a fresh amazement. How can the code for this corky structure be contained in the DNA of cells? How does it form so characteristically by species, into perfect runnels and ridges?

Set back from the new fenceline is a row of old posts, relics. Someone strung them with barbed wire while they were living trees, and the wire cut faces in them as they struggled to grow around it. I saw a moai god, come to Ohio. Rapalachian cow scratcher. 

I'm delighted to see the neighbors coming up out of the woods.

I haven't met them here this time of day.

The lone Holstein heifer takes herself a good scratch on the log god. Looks like he's saying Ooh Ooh Ooh.

I can see much of it is worn smooth from such daily attention. This is why I can't put bluebird boxes up in cow pastures. They'd get scratched and leaned and pushed right down.

This little Hereford bull calf is so adorable in his heavy fur coat. 

And I'm charmed by the markings on this one. Look at her bib, the spot between neck and breast; the particolored ears. Cattle are dead easy to tell apart at first glance. Whitetails, not so much. 

You can look at her stance and see something's going on here. She arches her back and cuts a luxuriant fart, doing her part to add to the world's methane.

In the woods, another little sprite pauses to look back at me. 

A smart person won't fall in love with beef cattle. Happy to be dumb then, blundering my way through others' hayfields, hanging on their fencelines, talking to the neighbors.

Marietta, Ohio-My Beautiful Town

Sometimes it feels to me that my life is nothing more than an unending search for beauty. I don't know anyone else who spends more time at it. It's really too bad my aesthetic quest doesn't pay, because I could be a billionaire. But then I probably wouldn't keep roaming around, searching for beauty. 

A semi-pro aesthetician like me does very well living near Marietta, Ohio. This little-sung brick-streeted town has a lot going for it. More and more I hear people literally go into raptures about Marietta. That didn't used to happen, but a lot of good things have taken place here since I came here in 1992.

I spent a gorgeous golden November afternoon gabbing with friends at the Local Artists' Show and Sale at the Lafayette Hotel. Then I walked down the levee to visit Mr. Lonely. After that, I crossed the Harmar railroad bridge. 

The new railing smelled sweetly of pine, shone in the late low sun, and lured me onward.

I always stop to consider this amazing sycamore limb. It just goes on and on. I take its picture, and always fail to capture its beauty.

I stood, dumbstruck. 

The river was like glass. Our beautiful "new" Putnam Street bridge sent a graceful reflection across the Muskingum.

Looking downriver, the Williamstown bridge crossed into West Virginia, across the mighty

 O-hi-o-se-pe. 

I crossed into Harmar Village and looked back toward town. Man. Beauty everywhere.

There was an InstaMeet last Friday, a tour of historic Marietta for people who like to post photos of Marietta on Instagram. I should have gone. I need to meet some more people in the area. Most of my friends live in my laptop, and I'm alone too much, I know that.

It would be nice to share this magnificent specimen of Magnolia grandiflora, for instance.

 

How it's survived our northern winters, how it throws dapples on that white house with its huge hard evergreen leaves. All those things. A miracle. It's so old its bark is shaggy and strippy, like a hickory's. And I love the homeowners for putting up with its terrible clattery drifts of fallen leaves, year round, for it has a tropical tree's habit of shedding leaves pretty much all the time. Clack, clack, clack. And they don't rot. I know, because I lived with a southern magnolia as a kid in Richmond, Virginia, and I hated raking those leaves. So much. But far more than that, I adored its huge white blossoms, the soft-winged orange soldier beetles that clambered around and coupled inside them, and I can still reconstruct every molecule of magnolia perfume in the back of memory's throat. Aesthetician from an early age. 

All these things came back to me as I gazed at the magnolia, rara avis among trees.

I walked a bit and came to Found Antiques, now home of Passiflora Studios. Quiet now, because wedding days are past. But soon enough they will start again. Phoebe worked here from time to time, and I loved to visit her. My, that's a nice blue farm table. But I don't need a table.

As I drove slowly home, I stopped at some favorite trees.

A gingko, throwing off her dress, setting the place on fire.

Throwing perfect little fans like gold coins to the ground below. How soon they lose their lustre!

The mighty twin sycamores of Second Street never fail to stop me in my tracks.

I get out to worship and record them here, most every time I pass. 

I wish there weren't a car in this shot, but it does give you some sense of scale. They are mighty, mighty trees. And people drive by them all the time. See, I can't. Stopped by the aesthetics of it all, footloose and frozen, too. Must say it's good of that sugar maple to kick in with the flamethrower, a meet backdrop for such a titanic tree. 

I headed home on the backest back road I could find, a new one for me, but already beloved for its cattle, its colors, its farmsteads.

The initial rollout, so tantalizing. Come along. I have something to show you...

Cattle set afire by the low sun.

The way that cherry-red pickup sits like a ruby in all the weathered wood; the maple dumping its color everywhere; the last sun stroking the gravel ridges.

A silo, such a rare thing anymore. Who has livestock, who needs to store feed? They are all dying out, the small farmers. You have to hit the dirt roads to find them.

Foxtail grass and a landscape straight from Grant Wood, gumdrop trees and perfect valleys.

My father would have slowed down to eye this tractor, that Chevy pickup, that barn. I, his daughter and made more of him than anyone, do it for him. 

A redtail crosses, of course. 

And the Graces stand naked in a row.