Too much wind for footprints in the snow. Mine will be erased by the time I head back.
A tattered birchbark flag flies out straight from the tree. An ice heart drips in the stream. Ferns like fish bones breathe above the snow.
The sigh of a car in the distance, they don’t know what they’re missing.
The snow is so thick and heavy that the woods are all arches and gates.
The low bushes reach across the path towards each other. I push the branches aside, and pass through them, snow clinging to my coat and pants, falling into my boots. They close behind me.
One of the pine trees I planted two years ago is bent so the top of it touches the ground. I release it, brushing off three inches of piled snow and it bounces up and down and up again.
Young bones.
Last nights snow was heavy and wet. It stuck to my shovel and was already melting down the icicles on the edge of the roof.
Later, in my studio, I listened as a tidal wave of snow slid from the slates arching over the bird feeder and piling up in a long line on the ground.
I didn’t really have time for a walk with Bellydancing class a couple of hours away. But tomorrow the snow might all be gone and the woods will be another place than it is today.
What I saw, that wasn’t there after the snow first fell, were lots of footprints. Mostly squirrel and rabbits, but also the flutter of a birds wings….
…and the Bobcat.
It’s the first I’ve seen of the bobcat since the summer when Fate found her scat on the rocks. Today, Zinnia and Fate walked the low rock wall covered in snow and footprints and most importantly to them, her scent.
I followed along, ducking under low branches till I lost the trial. I have no hopes of finding her. I don’t believe she’d let that happen, but I like to pretend. I imagine us looking each other, both of us startled, but neither of us moving long enough for me to get a good look. To get my fill of her wildness.
But in reality it would be me and two dogs confronting her. And I know that Fate and Zinnia want nothing to do with a bobcat. Just as they don’t want to catch the chipmunks and deer they always quickly give up chasing.
I look up from my laptop as I write this and see beads of rain running down the living room window. It will either freeze tonight or keep melting.
Tomorrows woods will tell another story.
The animals are fed and I walk to the back pasture to close the gate for the night. Fate bounces hopefully in front of me only wanting to go to the sheep. Zinnia runs ahead to swim in the pond even though a thin layer of ice covers half of it.
I have more work to do, but the new Gulley bridge beckons and I can’t resist.
That was yesterday when the bright yellow sun was streaming though the trees and turning what little green there is in the woods florescent.
The ferns and moss glowed making me pay special attention to them.
Almost every moss covered rock and tree stump was littered with nut shells and pine cones. I could just picture the squirrels and chipmunks, sitting on the soft green carpet of moss enjoying a meal.
There is a windfall of pinecones this year. They’re scattered throughout the woods, piled up under pine trees and caught hanging in bare branches. The tips crusted in sap like a Pine Cone Christmas ornament.
It’s been so warm this tree stump is sprouting plants. I can see why this seed was able to grow protected by the cliff of dead wood and nourished by the afternoon sun.
But the sun couldn’t reach into the hole of this elm tree to melt the frozen water that pools there.
This afternoon when the woods called again, yesterday’s bright greens had turned to sage, the trees silhouetted black against the gray sky, the pond too cold even for Zinnia.
As if in preparation for tomorrow’s snow.
I tell myself I’m only going for a short walk. But I know if I go to my neighbors woods It will be at least an hour. I start by walking a shorter path, but there is always a longer way to go and I can’t resist.
Even when it’s cold and damp like today, after walking a bit I crave how the bare skin on my face and fingers awaken to the icy air.
I found my first circle early on. A dot of white web with a vulva shaped tear on a fallen leaf.
I decide to look for more…
Even though I can’t see it, I know that pale yellow mushroom is a full circle underneath the leaves.
A ragged circle in the trunk of a tree filled with autumn leaves
A tiny hole in a beach leaf still on the small tree looked less like a circle when I zoomed in with my iPhone.
This circle, not made by nature, but still found in the woods. A hole to look through in the rusty metal of an old tricycle with Zinnia on the other side.
Fate sniffs every fallen branch, her nose stuck in the pine needles. She marks the spot, squatting and lifting one leg at the same time.
The silent swamp calls to me.
I follow the sun along a thin stretch of land mounded above the mud and reeds. I lean between the old pine and young beach tree. I am as still as the curling leaves and long rusty pine needles beneath my feet.
Zinnia is chest high in mud chomping on swamp grass as if she were a wild thing. Now she carries the smell of the swamp.
I peer into a healed woodpecker hole in the pine looking for the spider I know lives there.
Free to be who we are, we do what comes most natural to us.
Coyote scat and a burnt umber mushroom. Patches of sunlight as thick, but not as white, as autumn asters.
The constant chirp and chatter of busy chipmunks, the warning of a bluejay, and the distant hum of a tractor cutting hay.
A single red leaf hovers for a moment in front of my face, then sails back and forth and back and forth with a boat, like a crescent moon on its back, until it joins the others on the forest floor.
I peer into the hole in the pine tree and I want to go there.
Soft cave of rotting weathered wood. A grotto, the rain doesn’t reach, where I could sleep if I were a small mouse. I know there is another way out, a secret passage I can’t see.
I know I can go there and feel safe
when I wake up in the dark
afraid
In the past, when I mowed the path to the woods in the spring I was able to walk on it all summer. But this year we had so much rain everything grew lush and quickly. I knew the Gulley Bridge had fallen in one of the rainstorms, but I had the urge to walk in the Orphaned Woods.
So I put on my muck boots ready to walk through the stream.
But it was the tall grasses and wildflowers that were more prohibitive than the water. There were no ticks so it was only a matter of pushing through the wild-ness. Most of the grasses and flowers were taller than me.
Once we got into the woods it was easier walking.
The last time I saw the Gulley Bridge, there was so much water I didn’t know if the wood was washed away or just not visible. I have plans to fix it with a couple of cinder blocks, a ceramic chimney tile, and two long 2×6’s.
I’ll wait till some of the vegetation dies back so it will be easier to do.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures on my walk in the woods today. But the ones I did take were of mushrooms. I was drawn to mushrooms and the environment around them.
Here they are….
This one seemed like a balancing act. The moss-covered rock was jutting out of the ground at one angle and the mushroom at the opposite.
The hole in this fallen log and the mushroom growing in the space under it, reminded me of the caves in the rocks in Bandelier, NM.
This mushroom was snuggled in the mossy roots of a tree.
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