Milkweed and the Coming of Autumn

I have spent an inordinate amount of time indoors this week, time sitting, listening, using my ears.

Soon, I’ll over-correct for these excesses, standing and walking and using my eyes and making up for a week in a foreign land. And more details about that to be sure. I have been all around this world, as the Grateful Dead song boasted.

I’ll drive south through Whitesburg, then Wise, finally out of coal country in the long trough and furrow of the Ridge and Valley. It will seem like home again when I reach the far side of Pilot Mountain and the rounded granite hills of the Blue Ridge.

And now it is August. Milkweed will be going fast to pod and I’ll find with my camera a rogue’s gallery of insects feeding on the milky sap. Joe Pye Weed rises to dominance both by its own growth even while the lesser forbs and annuals begin to die back as if they are being drawn back into the warm soil of late summer.