November Walk in the Woods
One thing I've learned from years of wandering the woods is that when I go out EXPECTING to find something (a really unusual feather, or some exceptional plant) I find nothing. Ever the optimist, I stuffed a plastic bag into one of my vest pockets, but left my intent behind. No camera, either. Just hands in pockets and hat over the ears.
My very first impression was that I had walked out of my house into NOVEMBER. There is a QUIET to November here in the Northeast US that is like no other time of year. It's the auditory version of the shade of grey that old split rail fences turn over time. Not quite winter, not quite fall, but its very own shade of grey.
I thought about September when colors just can't help blushing with ripeness and October when the sky gets so blue you can't take it and the leaves throw parties all over. All that bright noise is over now. I begin to wonder at how we spend our childhoods coloring the trunks of trees with our brown crayons. They are decidedly grey. As a matter of fact, they are so much the same color as the boulders in the woods that it looks for all the world as though the trees were simply boulders that grew straight up, whereas the boulders chose to sit this one out.
I walk beneath a 'starling tree'. These are the weed versions of birds around here. A huge flock of them will populate a large tree with their sweet chatterings. Though I don't relish their demolishing everything in the bird feeder, (any more than I relish some weeds taking over my flowerbeds) I do get a kick out of their presence, especially at this time of year. And I know how they got there. The entire huge flock launched itself across the sky as though someone had thrown a huge handful of birds and they all just got stuck in the tree. And they had plenty to say about that as I walked by.
I turn off the paved farm road and head into the woods. For awhile there is a roadway where the suggestion of double tire tracks is still evident beneath the carpet of leaves. The usual band of hardy road warriors is here, the ever resilient 'pathway sedge', no longer leathery green but a winter-wheat color still with no signs of brittleness; bits of goldenrod escaped from the fields; either truly brave or slightly foolish mountain laurel seedlings. Everything that had been an aster has shed its petals, lost its fluff and presents to me silvery star-like bracts. I am suddenly put in mind of a set of song lyrics of mine from many, MANY years ago. "The stars are shining in the grass, the flowers are in the sky, my roots run deep down to the sun, but that's how I can fly....." MANY years ago. That makes me smile.
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