A single drop of water touches my arm, then another. I look up for a bird but only see the bare branches of the old birch. Then I look down and see that the ground is wet where I’m standing.
I remember experiencing this last year in the woods. When I wrote about it someone told me that some trees drip sap.
I watched the drops fall from the birch branch and held out my hand to catch them. They came within seconds of each other in a two-foot area and tasted like warm water.
I read that when it’s suddenly very hot sometimes a birch tree will suck up a lot of water from the ground. If there are no leaves on the tree to take the water in, it will then leak out. It makes sense that this is what is happen with the birch, it’s been unusually hot for the past two days.
The heat is also pushing up the perennials in my gardens.
I’m slowly raking them out. Today it was my shade garden where the Mayapples are up in varying stages. They are such unusual plants. They have the shape of mushrooms when they first appear, then the leaves become umbrellas protecting the white flowers and yellow fruit.
The leaves opening on a mayapple. This one reminds me of a bat.
Although Eastern Newts stay active all winter, even mating late in the season, this is the first I’ve seen of them in the pond in the back pasture.
We have lots of newts, they thrive in ponds where there are few fish. I used to see more fish in our pond, but I think the blue heron has been feasting on them these past few years.
The newt I saw yesterday is mature and can live up to fifteen years. The females (I can’t tell the difference between male and female newts) will lay eggs in our pond and when the larvae mature, they will leave the pond and live on dry land for about four years.
These are the little orange spotted newts called efts, that come out in the woods when it rains.
The efts spend their days looking for another pond or stream to live in and live the rest of their lives underwater.
An eft I took a picture of last summer in the woods. They hibernate under the soil in the winter.
The branch fell from our beautiful big old paper birch this winter. And it’s as intriguing on the ground as it was when it was growing from the tree.
Jon has been taking pictures of it since it fell and the hens have claimed it as their new hangout. It’s great camouflage for them and the arch made by the branch on the ground is perfect for them to walk under.
Today I cut some of the smaller branches off the fallen limb. Partly to start the process of cleaning it up (Our handyman Mike will chainsaw and split the bigger pieces for firewood ) but also to give to Sue for her art class.
Last December one of Sue’s art projects for her students was to make small Christmas trees using white birch branches. So when the limb fell, I thought of Sue and her art class.
Today I cut off the smaller branches from the birch limb. Then I cut the thicker one into pieces, in varying lengths. The topmost twigs were already sprouting catkins which the donkeys and sheep were happy to munch on. I got two bags full of white birch branches for Sue’s art room.
It’s only as I was writing this that I realized what a gift that fallen birch limb is.
I took this picture when the Birch limb fell late in December. I’ll save the mushrooms before Mike cuts up limb for firewood.
It plopped right in front of me, a blump of wet snow.
It fell from a maple branch pocking the snow at my feet, making it impossible to distinguish it from the footprints of small animals. There will be little to see in the woods this afternoon I thought disappointed. I came to the woods to find animal tracks in the fresh snow.
Instead, I found a telephone post in the woods.
That’s what I thought until I followed the Dot to Dot woodpecker holes, up the pole and saw it was a pine tree.
It twisted slightly toward the top, otherwise, it was a telephone pole. Naked of bark, bare of branches, the right circumference, texture, and color. I looked more than once just to be sure. It seemed a trick. It made more sense that it was a tree, but still, it looked more like a pole. As long as I didn’t look up too high.
That pine tree pole opened my eyes. Until then I was just walking through the woods disappointed, not seeing the unexpected.
Now I had hope again. I wanted the magic, the wonder. So I ducked under every arched tree and stepped through the awkward shapes made by the wildly thick grapevines, hoping for Narnia.
And then the raven flew over bringing magic as they do, silently patrolling the sky above us.
It was after that I saw the turkey tail mushrooms. Surrounded by a desert of snow, growing on the stump of a dead tree, they were lushly sprouting a carpet of bright green moss.
The mushrooms grew one above the other, cantilevered so the bottom of one was the roof of the one below it. In my mind I wandered in, the moss soft and warm on my bare feet. The stalactite ceiling holding my gaze with its folds and crevasses. But surely a spider, maybe even a wolf spider, lives in the dark hole that is an entrance into the dead tree.
And here I am on her luxurious patio.
So I took a picture, grateful not to be an insect. Then I call to the dogs and we headed home with stories to tell.
Now the path was covered in leaves. Mostly a mottled yellow and pink but depending on the trees it might turn a rich reddish-orange almost as if someone had covered the ground with a throw rug.
Yesterday’s rain brought down a lot of the leaves. But it must be too cold for most mushrooms. We didn’t see any orange newts either.
But we did see the Barred Owl.
The afternoon sun specked the woods with bright yellow light, the shadows were a dark contrast, until I came to the part of the path that curved sharply to the left.
The woods around me had not changed, but further ahead the trees seemed to create an archway and beyond it, the forest looked like it was shrouded in a soft yellow haze.
I thought of how painters soften their colors as a way of creating perspective. All those foggy landscapes behind the portraits of wealthy patrons or mystical beings.
I wanted to be in that soft glowing place.
But I stood looking at it a while longer, not wanting to hurry. I was afraid it would be like the mist on the farm in the mornings. How it seems to dissipate when I walk into it. Yet at a distance, it’s so thick the trees are ghosts.
So I walked slowly, thinking that even if it faded as I got closer, I’d try to hold onto the feeling it evoked in me. That desire to dull my senses, to soften like the light.
When I finally did step over the threshold into that magical space I realized it was as much the yellowing ferns on the ground and the smooth gray bark of the beech trees as the light.
I walked the deer trail through the ferns that reminded me of faded paper, my gaze gentle, the muscles in my face relaxing, my footfalls purposeful.
I was in the distance, in the background of the painting. The part painted by the student of the master painter, whose name would never be known. A peaceful place to be.
But it didn’t last long. Soon I was around the bend and up the hill. That’s when the owl came again.
Fate and Zinnia were ahead of me and she flew between us across the path. She landed close enough so I could see her eyes, and the lighter markings on her feathers. Once again I said hello.
Soon she flew to a tree further away but still in sight. I watched her until she swooped down from the branch in the opposite direction and disappeared into the woods.
I’m no longer surprised to see the owl. I almost expect it. But, still, I’m delighted and curious about how she keeps showing up.
The only mushrooms I saw. They were about an inch tall and growing on a moss-covered tree trunk.
Since nothing, absolutely nothing was happening in my studio, I decided to go for a walk in the woods.
But I didn’t want to go on my neighbor’s path that I’ve been walking lately. I needed to get off the path and into the woods. I was craving wandering without knowing exactly where I was going.
I wanted to go to The Orphaned Woods.
I hadn’t been to the woods behind the farm since the grasses and bushes grew so tall I couldn’t get through them early in the summer. This year I didn’t mow a path as I had the past couple of years. To get from the farm to the woods, I’d have to hack my way through the tall grasses and bushes while getting covered in ticks at the same time.
So I loaded Fate and Zinnia into my car and drove to the path that would take me to the woods that connects to The Orphaned Woods.
As if in affirmation, as soon as I stepped off the path into the woods, I saw the Barred Owl flying from one tree to another. Then I saw the bird, which I think was a bluejay, chasing it. I watched for a while, as the blue jay squawked and the owl silently moved out of its way, without giving up ground.
When the owl vanished from my view, we headed up the hill towards the Orphaned Woods.
“I missed you”, I said out loud as I stepped over the stone wall into the woods, my heart softening.
I visited the Big Old Hickory and the Maple with the broken branch. I squatted down to get a close look at the many mushrooms with taking a picture of them. Zinnia splashed through the small pond created when a Shagbark Hickory uprooted last summer.
Fate led the way back to the farm, but I called the dogs back as the bushes started to get thick. We had to go home the way we came.
The woods get by fine without my visits. I had the feeling they had to adjust to my coming back. Or maybe it’s that I felt as if I were a bit of a stranger. Because I didn’t get to see the gradual changes that the summer brings, a part of me expected the woods to look as I last saw them in the late spring.
Now that I’ve been, I know I’ll want to go back again before the path from the farm is clear enough for me to walk it.
Wandering those woods was just what I needed to bring myself back. To empty my mind of the voices and ideas that have been lodged there. I think mostly that what I let go of was my own expectations of myself and what I should be doing.
Jon calls it recharging the creative self.
That’s a good way of thinking about it. A letting go, so I can start again.
Fate drinking from the little pond made by the uprooted hickory tree.
The back pasture is bursting with flowers. It’s areas like this that I’m keeping the sheep from going into. This is where they get their wool tangled with sticky seeds. Many of the flowers are dying already, but there are still plenty in bloom.
I found this flowery mushroom growing near the pond.
And while I was looking for mushrooms, Fate was stalking some small creature living in the tall grasses on the edge of the marsh.
My studio is a wreck. I switched from working on my Heron to working on some more dog potholders today. I’ll finish up the ones I made last week and put them up for sale in my Etsy Shop tomorrow.
But I’ll have to clean up the piles of fabric laying around my studio before I do more work on my Heron. And I keep thinking of those mushrooms too. I don’t want to think the out of existence. It’s a good problem to have, having a hard time deciding what to work on next.
Bud was good enough to stand still for a moment for the picture of my studio. Fate often inserts herself in my photos without me asking, but Bud needs some coaxing. He was rewarded with a treat, which I’m sure he knew he’d get.
Below is one of the Jack Russell Terrier Potholders I designed today.
I took my macro lens with me on our walk in the woods today. The picture above is of the sap pearling around a woodpecker hole in a pine tree.
This is another hole on the same tree. The sap formed differently here, surrounding the hole making a smooth and shiny entrance.
This is a close-up of one of those drops of sap. You can see some tiny insect stuck the sap on the right.
And this is a picture of a web between two mushrooms on a branch. The space between the mushrooms is about a quarter of an inch. It seems a mystical world in there.
