Getting Out, Every Day

I'd miss so much if I didn't get out every day. Yes, we have to bundle up a bit, but the winter landscapes are so worth it. Baker and I are about to go out now, in fact, after waiting half the day for the sun to come out and melt off the ice.

The recent fronts passing through dumped a lot of rain on us, followed by snow. When it's rainy, our road turns to mud, and running with Chet means I have to bathe him immediately upon returning. It's a drag. So we drive to one of the paved roads where we won't get so muddy.

We've been running this one a lot lately.

We've found a couple more leaf stencils from the 2013 fall line painting to admire. When Chet sees me hunkered down photographing one, he moves in to improve the view. He always improves the view.

I find a pile of logs that I call "Oh no you don't." It's meant to keep cattle from squeezing under the barbed wire fence in a low spot. The deer start such ruts and the cattle follow suit. About all the Warrens can do is build the rut back up with wood. Resetting the posts is the path to madness.

Skies have been glowery almost all the time. Standing at this spot, though, I heard a call from a red-headed woodpecker who's spending the winter on this road.  Every once in a while I am lucky enough to see it when it changes trees, this banner of black, white and red churning through the gray trunks. I first heard it in October and I've heard or seen it four times since. Now my runs on this road are the stuff of pilgrimage, hoping to have another encounter with a bird I can never see enough.

I heard a red-head

not far from here. Its call punched

a smile in the clouds