Driving the 500 miles to my son’s home is almost half the fun of visiting. I enjoy driving, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of Breezewood is beautiful road – long uphills and down, plenty of curves and vistas where one can look across the mountains rounded from eons of wind and rain wearing them down. They say those mountains once were taller than the Alps. Which makes me wonder: Continue reading
Most of us know them as yucky places that’ll suck your feet off if you go wading there. Lots of really neat creatures live there, though maybe it’s best to stay in the boat, or at least on the high, relatively dry, ground, when one goes exploring. Along with bullfrogs and, maybe, Ivory Billed woodpeckers, there exist, in some of the larger examples, rare turtles and alligators. Continue reading
Somehow, the forest seems to have a much richer appearance this year than normal, like a photograph shot with color saturation selected to Vivid. A friend suggested it’s because of all the rain we have been experiencing. If this keeps up, apples peaches and other fruit should be larger and juicer than normal, as well. Continue reading
Water. We human mammals – those of us born without fins, anyway – spend nine months in a balloon full of the stuff, plotting our escape, then spend much of our air-breathing lives trying to at least live next to it. We pay a premium for housing as close to it as we can to a stream, lake or ocean and post signs around it announcing our success to those who must settle for looking out their front windows at our back doors.
Her grandma and I had our first date on Kass’ second
birthday. Wednesday evening, we celebrated her survival to legal age to consume
alcoholic beverages.
I finally photographed my first Osprey.
He came up from a creek, across the corn field where I stood trying to grab
some pictures of Red-winged Blackbirds./p>
I wonder what he thought of the stranger standing alongside the road. He had seen humans, sometimes walking, sometimes driving a tractor, carving rows in the soil.
‘Tis the season, for bicycle riding for some of us. I’ve hauled mine down from its hook in the garage. The wheels still are round and seem to stay that way under the weight of Yours Truly. Now to put some miles on it, as my medical person has been recommending. I walk quite a bit, or maybe it just seems that way.
There is something about the color of the trees after a heavy
rain, like a master painter had poured an extra ration of pigment onto the
canvas. There is a marked richness and intensity to the forest that wants to enfold
me.
I eat red grapes the way some
people eat Hershey Kisses, or jelly beans. One at a time, sometimes two, by the
handful. Green grapes, not so much.
Earlier this spring, the grocery store was selling large plastic bags full of red grapes for, well, an affordable price. The price was proclaimed in large black letters; one had to squint a bit to see whether it was a bag or a pound.
Andrew Wheeler, the new head of EPA, recently said he doesn’t
think we earthlings will have a problem with our home for another 50-75 years.
Gizmo was a tiny Pekingese
with a striking resemblance to the mogwai – we call them gremlins – in the movie of the same name. That movie was how I learned the three important rules of gremlins:
I have pictures of them chasing each other around the wood, playing tag, showing off, and sometimes producing copies of themselves.
When many of us think of the woolly mammoth, I’m guessing we think of Queen Latifah, or at least the voice she gave to Ellie the woolly mammoth in the “Ice Age” movie franchise. For the record, the ice age ended about 11,000 years ago, and so did Ellie and her mate, Manny.
One thing I’ve learned about dogs is, “don’t buy one.” The only dog to ever live with me that I paid for didn’t stay long.
Actually, I think someone stole him to hunt deer – you could use dogs in Virginia when I lived there. I bet he didn’t object when the dognapper promised a life in the woods. In a way, I don’t blame him.
LBelow and in front of the porch rail, the surface of Marsh
Creek is smooth like a 200-year-old farmhouse window pane, smoothly rippled as
the flow wanders and eddies its way to lower elevations. Reflections of creekside
oaks and sycamores decorate the translucent surface of the flow, itself browned
from nearby mountains’ muddied runoff – poor man’s fertilizer, some farmers call
it –in rounded jaggies across the stream. A short way up the creek, mated Red-tailed
hawks and a few Bald eagles prepare for their new families.
Across the glassine stage at the foot of the hill there pass pairs of Canada Geese, a few mallards and their current loves – Canada geese mate for life, mallards for convenience – and a clan of mergansers.
Like the rest of us, when the cost of some new endeavor outweigh
the potential benefits, we balk at increasing our expenses. My mom had an aging
pickup and wondered whether it was time to trade.
If a company can be granted personhood, why not a lake,
especially a lake that is a primary freshwater supply. Voters in Toledo, Ohio answered
that question last month, saying Lake Erie has the right “to exist, flourish,
and naturally evolve” – rights normally enjoyed by a person.
One night
when the temperature was hovering way too close to the bottom of the
thermometer, I decided to look for a hat.
When we in Adams County take a shower, when we slather margarine on a piece of toast, or spray non-fat grease on a frying pan, we may be adding another family to the next caravan of Central American refugees heading north.
Red-tailed hawks are
warming to togetherness, indicating, more accurately than that four-legged
critter from Punxsutawney, that the weather also is soon to warm. Of course,
most Red-tailed hawks do not have television cameras staring at them to record
whether they see their shadow while swooping down on an unsuspecting breakfast.