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Harvest season has begun in the Couple Acre Wood.
We stand still among the trees, the dog and I, and listen to hickory nuts, some whole and some in the pieces remaining from the ongoing repast of Eastern gray squirrels, clattering from the canopy like balls in a wooden pachinko machine.
Continue reading Smells of new rain(Click the Play arrow to listen to this column.)
One recent morning as we headed out on our morning mission in the Couple Acre Wood, my young dog-buddy became captured by a decomposing hickory log. We had passed it numerous times, but this time it grabbed him by the nose and wouldn’t let go.
Continue reading A bug hunting dogOne of the coolest scenes in the woods is when I go out with the pup after dark. I wear a headlight so I can find my way over and around the chainsawed tree trunks and busted branches — my eyes not being as good in the dark as Bowie’s, or the neighbors’ cats whose eyes I count glowing in pairs from their hunting posts in the Couple Acre Wood.
If I fall in the woods while being tugged vigorously by the pup at the at the end of a 26-foot leash, I occasionally get to brag because the aforementioned pup — who likely contributed significantly to my being on my backside on the ground — comes back to sit beside me until I feel like hoisting myself back to my feet, at which point he resumes his tugging, searching for whatever next grabs his attention.
Continue reading Getting out of the car
Standing in the rain in the middle of the forest. Individual rain drops tap the hickory leaves, then slide off onto my hat and face and then to the ground. I try to listen to the drops falling farther from me, but they become millions and blend into a low roar.
Continue reading Raindrops and waterfallsThe dogwood outside my window has turned bright pink, speckled with green as the chlorophyll machinery deploys to process the warming sunlight. Nearby, a plethora of ground plants have for weeks decorated the forest floor. Some of them soon will disappear or fade-to-green as the taller hickories and oaks leaf into sun-blocking umbrellas.
Bees have begun to find the blossoms of the ground-hugging Spring Beauties, Dead Nettles (so-named because they do not sting the way real nettles do) and other ephemeral decorations. And the show-offs of the springtime plant world, the daffodils.
I have learned to talk nice to our lawn mower. My spouse tells me if I am friendly to the machine, it will work better, or at least longer. It makes sense, sort of.
The thing is, I’m not a lawn mowing kind of guy. Grass has been growing and dying and growing back for a very long time, with no human help necessary.
In the world according to Sam Emery, every time we mow a lawn some Arabian princess strings another bauble on her charm bracelet. I do it, though, because I love the person who thinks it needs done and sometimes she can’t do it.
March wind waves the blossoming red leaves of the maple, bluebirds and cardinals clinging to the branches as they try to overpower the blossoming red leaves with their own raiment. It’s not yet Easter, but many critters are eager to show off their colors.
Grabbing seeds from the grass, diminutive Dark-eyed Juncos in their white vests and dark gray waistcoats, weave across the yard, among the sparrows and dove, like tiny preachers chasing down sinners in need of salvation. A pair of Northern Cardinals jet through the branches of our Silver Maple, shouting at each other the taunt that has marked boys’ and girls’ spring ritual since time immemorial. “You can’t catch me — yes, I can.”
Most of the men – and they were mostly men – I looked up to back in the day have turned out to be racist. Or misogynistic. Or both.
George Washington, for instance, was the Father of Our Country, though I was suspicious even then of the story about him being unable to lie? I know no young person who could not, when pressed, cultivate an untruth to some degree.
I have not yet pulled out our snowthrower. I am counting on the natural snow fence at the western side of the county to save me from enriching Exxon.
I learned about snow fences as a kid. Farmers would stretch what looked like rows of slatted window blinds turned sideways across their roadside fields. Wind-driven snow would hit them and rise up, to be dropped on the other side, well before it reached the road.
It was like standing on the edge of a pool, watching the trees change color as a river of fog flowed over the far ridge, filling the valley in front of me, flowing up the slope to gently, silently wrap itself around me.
The fog condensed on the leaves of pines and Scarlet oaks, collecting into drops that fell gently onto my shirtless shoulders. Trees shivered at the impending winter, shaking blizzards of expired summer raiment cascading to the soil. Even as they fade into the soil, the leaves create a kaleidoscope of color, illustrating the diversity of life surrounding me.
It’s fall in Adams County and the South Mountains of South Central Pennsylvania. A variety of native trees, like an artist’s brushes, color the land in oranges, yellows and reds as though they had been spilled on an artist’s palette. As I stood talking with Pa. Forest Ranger Scott Greevy, acorns fell from the surrounding oaks, crashing like gunfire onto his truck.
Deer hunting season was about to open and our main topic was an illness carried by Whitetail deer.
When I was many years younger, I cut wood in summer, pulled it from the forest, then chopped and split it into stove-size pieces and stacked it neatly to dry for winter.
Winter was cold in those days, though as a youngster I only felt it when there were chores to do. Snowball fights and sledding were not cold. Bringing in firewood and water from the well were frigid activities.
The evening news this week has treated us to newly recorded images of many objects which, at the time the they were sent to earth, may no longer have existed. In the time taken for light to travel from the as yet unknown end of the universe, stars previously unknown have birthed and died.
It has been noted by people who calculate such things that if the 4.5 billion years this planet has been a-making were converted to a 24-hour clock, we humans have been here less than five minutes. Sixty-six million years ago, give or take a few months, what must have looked to the universe to be a small pebble hurtled through the blackness we humans would eventually call “space” and crashed into a larger rock circling what humans eventually would call The Sun.
Several years ago, when I was still a daily news reporter, I covered an event in which three busloads of youngsters from inner-city Philadelphia arrived to visit a potato chip factory. It was the first time most of them had been out of the city.
“We saw cows!” several of them reported excitedly.
Grandma and her offspring’s offspring lit out for Classic Movie night at the theater. I get to sit in the backyard, write a column, and watch fireflies.
I often wonder what is going on behind the eyes of critters I observe as I wander the creeks and forests within range of my home. I went wading in a local stream this week and found a whole feast of mud puppies – it would have been a feast had I brought along a net – and an assortment of bugs and fish of multiple species.
I love watching the stars, like LED Christmas lights pinned to a blanket stretched like a child’s bedroom tent over my head. They all seem to be the same distance from where I lay, just out of reach of my fingers, though in my mind I know the distances from me to them varies.
Imagine a movie in which you could walk around among the characters and activities. You can reach out and touch them, talk with them, and see them interact with each other.
Wandering in the forest is like that, where you’re an actor in a perpetually changing story, where trees are the stars of the show, providing the environment for the panoply of other characters.
