Category: The Orphaned Woods

The sheep led by Asher followed me to the back pasture.  “Not yet,” I told them as I slipped between the gates, making sure not to open them too wide and closing them quickly behind me.

Zinnia was at my heals and I knew Fate would slip under the gate by the time I got to to the Gulley Bridge.

A low, battered purple and white violet, greeted me at the stone wall.

At the stream one of the Marsh Marigolds was in full bloom.  The thick petals and saturated yellow, a feast this time of year.

Next I visited the dead standing tree.  At its roots are a collection of owl pellets.  It’s easy to imagine the owl living here, high up in one of the old woodpecker holes.

Each pellet made of tiny bones poking out of matted gray fur.  Off to the side a skull, its teeth intact.

There were no other flowers yet, but I found many mounds of columbine leaves and one trout lily on the verge of opening up.

And a few ferns shrouded in cocoon-like webs waiting to unfurl.

There seems to be more life than death this time of year.  But with the help of Zinnia and Fate I found the remains of a squirrel, mostly fur and bones in the hollow of a fallen tree.  It made a kind of casket, the space in the log only wide enough to peer into.

And on the way back, scat on the stone wall.

It must be the Bobcat I thought.  I couldn’t imagine a coyote squatting so high on the wall.  But then to prove me wrong, Fate jumped up on the rocks and put her face in mine.

I heard the donkeys bray in the distance.

“I’m coming,” I said more to myself than the animals.  But I have a feeling they heard me.

The wind comes
like a whispering ghost
a quiet shush,
a long breath out

down the path,
behind my back.

I turn and last years leaves are lifting up from the path

they float and swirl

I watch
until the last two
slowly dance their way
back and forth
to the forest floor

This is the Shagbark Hickory I always visit in The Orphaned Woods.  With the help of the rain, we made music together.

The woods are green again.  Not up high, but low to the ground.

The raindrops are big and heavy.  They splat loudly on and around me.

Marsh marigolds with yellow buds, perfectly round hummocks sprouting grass like sunbeams, wild mustard, the spotted leaves of Trout lilies and hundreds or thousands of tiny stems and leaves.

There’s a hollowed out bone, like a sacrifice, nestled in the moss on a rock.  The underside is smooth and the top chiseled by rodent teeth. It’s been there long enough to leave an impression in the moss.

The rootball of the fallen Shagbark Hickory is starting to sprout.  The plants still grow straight up towards the sun, it’s just that their “straight up” is different than it used to be.

The deer trail is even easier to find with green on both sides. Fate and Zinnia’s curious noses find deer poop too good to pass up. I don’t call them away, just as they leave me to stare at the raindrops decorating the thin horizontal branches of the Musclewood.

I step over a broken elm, thin enough for me to wrap my hands around, the buds still green with life.

A raindrop from below the water of the shallow muddy pond radiates out making bigger and bigger circles.  If it had a sound it would be the distant, smoothed-out chatter of spring peepers.

Beneath the biggest circle
a puff of mud…like smoke

when it clears a frog appears
her nose and feet erased by mud

“And now in the woods, I once again revisit the idea of simply staying here, in the woods-with great interior freedom, and applying myself to the main business, which has nothing to do with places, and does not require a beach of pure white Caribbean sand.  Only silence and a curtain of trees.”
Thomas Merton, “When The Trees Say Nothing”

Jon has been talking about and quoting Thomas Merton since I met him.  I often find Merton’s writing difficult to make sense of.  It is too much like being in church for me.  He writes in a language that I don’t understand.

Until Jon bought me Merton’s book “When The Trees Say Nothing”.  It is a book of Journal entries about nature.  It is in these writings by Thomas Merton that his God makes sense to me.

Winter came back on the third day of spring.  I’m on my way to see skunk cabbage in the snow.

I wonder if this time, this crossover, between winter and spring isn’t like the time between waking and sleeping. When  the conscious and subconscious collide. When  dreams and reality are indistinguishable from each other.

It’s  cold enough for me to wish I had worn my mittens, which I haven’t worn all winter.

The sun comes out as we pass the old barn foundation it warms my face as a shiver runs up and down my arms.  

The wind sprinkles snow from the pines like confectioners sugar through a sifter.  Fairy-dust in the sunlight.

I find the skunk cabbage in the swamp.  Little snow covered amphitheaters popping up through the ice. Their seed ball cradled safely  within.

The more I look, the more appear.
Some are all but buried in snow.  

We head back and the ravens circle playfully above.  They dance  between the bare branches of winters, spring trees.

There are two of them. Big and glistening, shiny black. One calls out thick and gutsy. Less a sound,  than more a deep knowing in my gut.

Almost home, I blow a kiss to the mother tree on the edge of the shallow pond.  For a moment the sun comes out and lights up the long oval hole high up on her trunk.

I feel like she is saying hello back to me. 

A part of me knew the ticks would be out in the woods today (and they were).  But it was damp and rainy and felt cold to me.  So Fate and Zinnia and I walked over the Gulley Bridge (the water has receded so I didn’t even get my boots wet) over the tumbled rocks in the stone wall and into the woods. 

First we walked along the stream but something caught my eye in the old pile of garbage left by the people who lived on the farm before us.

There are piles of rocks in the woods, put there by the farmers who cleared the trees for grazing sheep  and built the stone walls.  High piles of small rocks they couldn’t use, or never got to.  There are piles of scat, markings left by coyote and bobcats.  There are piles of branches from fallen trees.  And piles of empty hickory and hazel nut shells left by squirrels and chipmunks on broken stumps, rocks, and in holes in trees.

The garbage pile is mostly metal and glass.

And near that pile of human garbage, I found a pile of animal garbage in an old Woodpeckers hole in a tree.   The empty hickory nut shells looked like little clay bowls to me.

I went for a walk, with Fate and Zinnia in our neighbors woods today.  I wanted to see if the skunk cabbage was coming up in the swamp.

It was too early for the Skunk Cabbage, but we did smell a skunk near the shallow pond where I took our shadow portrait.

We hadn’t been on that path for a while and the wind took down some trees since we were last there.

Fate was sniffing the massive pine branch that lay on the side of the path.  It broke where the tree forked and a squirrels nest was nestled.   The nest was still high in the tree, but the splintered pine on the ground was dripping with sap.

I crouched down to smell it too.  Looking inside the broken pine was like peering into a cave decorated with hundreds of miniature crystal drops from a chandelier.

The skunk cabbage may not be sprouting yet, but the moss is.  The decaying tree trunks were blooming bright green with hints of red.  One stump even had five small white mushrooms that looked  like scallop shell umbrellas.