Mon Mar 23 (Day 9) 4:30 PM. Wind wind wind. Northwest and blowing and blowing. No white caps on the pond though, and only a few leaves skipping about. Low 30s, cold, sunny, a few cumulus clouds. The sun is beautiful; the maple trunks half in light, half in dark. One maple branchlet has a chunk of white ice hanging from it. Bobbing in the wind. A pair of ducks drifts slowly down the pond, carried by the wind. I go stand with my back to the beech, which beckons me to climb it. Another day. There are many more beech nut husks right here at the base, and nuts, too. It's been 2 years since it masted, I wonder if those nuts have anything in them. A different leaf sprouting on the ground: roundish with toothed edges. Might be a violet, but it looks rounder to me. Just one. A pair of turkey vultures over the pond. One or two blackbirds. The beech branches are all wrinkly at their base, where they emerge from the trunk, like a tightly wrinkled bit of shirt sleeve.
Tues Mar 24 (Day 10) 1:30 PM. Today the first thing I did was go and hug the beech tree. It's very huggable, just the size of a big round person. Then I sat with my back to the wind, facing SSE for a change, towards the road, the younger maple, hickories, and hemlock. I haven't mentioned the hemlock. It's in the SE corner of my quadrangle, fairly young, about 25 ft high, thick with branches. The wind was so strong today the upper ones were standing up nearly straight against the trunk. Looks almost painful to me they were blowing so hard. But I guess it's not like the deciduous ones, more flexible. I just feel bad whenever I look at it because all the hemlocks around here have woolly agelid, and are probably doomed. I've seen the corpses. This one's near where I buried my last dog, sort of standing watch, so that adds to the pathos. Actually it's pretty healthy at this point, with branches practically down to the ground. Along the Southern boundary wall there's a baby pine (3 ft high) and a baby hemlock (I think, have to look closer. 2 ft high). And then at the SW corner there's "grandfather" -- the oldest maple around that is in its final years, with some long thick dead trunks and some live ones. I love the way the old maples had sent out long branches over a foot thick which run 10 or 15 feet off the ground and straight out like 40 feet, an image of strength. The grandfather tree has good holes for squirrels and places for woodpeckers to eat. The wind today blew and blew again, more variable though, sometimes coming strong from the NE, sometimes NW, quiet a bit, then gusts so noisy with leaves flying in all directions I felt like ducking from some anticipated broken branch hurtling by. Nerves of steel, as they say. Meanwhile I looked at plant x... "frond" which isn't really a good name, I've got to look through newcomb's flower book at leaves. It has quite variable leaves, some are lobed practically to a split, others evenly toothed, all with that stem with the trough running down the middle of it. I want to taste it, but having seen poison hemlock at the BBG, which looks like a tasty relative of parsley or celery, I'm not doing any random taste tests. I saw a new leaf too, an inch long (like much at this season), oval, with little notches, 3 on each side, like little slits. No birds today except a glimpse of one, maybe a robin, and a few chirps behind me. There's a ridge of ground, a gentle hump, running parallel to the south wall about 10 ft in, I bet my father used to dump yard waste there. I remember coming into this quadrangle with him years ago, wheelbarrows of leaves and such. Always a plan, and me always following him. Ghosts.
No comments:
Post a Comment