Category Seasons

True Colors

This year’s fall foliage gets very high marks for intensity, variety and duration of color. No late tropical storms have blown away the leaves just at their prime. No persistent droughts or drowning floods have afflicted the southern mountains to disappoint…

What Difference Does a Season Make?

I’m catching up with myself, from this time a few years back when I imagined keeping up all along through an entire year with a seasonal journal–part of my “Floyd County Almanac” that sits just exactly where it did when…

Maple, Dreaming

There lives this one tree to which I have bonded, this maple–outside the window over my desk, just beyond the green mailbox. It is deeply rooted in my life. It stands for all the trees in all the world, an object…

SumSumSummertime

I have to admit that, so far–with the disturbing exception of our very local ongoing drought–it has been a benign summer. We can even cut grass and string trim and do other puttering in the middle of the day, off…

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

It is a terrible comparison, rainbows to snakes, but they both are silent in their appearance; and no matter how many times you see one above or below, it startles you when suddenly there they are right in front of you.…

Vegetables: Not Without Water

This time of year, the day starts early and ends late. It starts and ends outdoors. These are the HHH days, where heat, haze and humidity spawn afternoon showers–if we’re lucky. If we’re not, the garden takes an extra hour…

Green on Green In Black and White

It is now the time of year when I enter both temperamental and photographic aestivation: that state of hot-weather torpor  typical of some terrestrial turtles. When conditions become too extreme for them to be in the presence of other turtles and remain…

Creek Jots ~ Late May 2014

â–¶ Barely Bears: after seeing momma and her cub a dozen times this spring,  they’ve gone missing now for more than a week. Last encounter, the baby bear that Gandy chased up a tree a month ago instead chased the…