No Excuses

OK.  It's been over a quarter of a year since I've written, or drawn, or photographed.  Actually, that's not true... Since early April, I've nature journaled and drawn -- though not much -- but I've done it.  I have no excuse, really, I just didn't feel like blogging, and it shouldn't be a chore, and then it had been so long I just didn't know how to go back... I still don't feel like scanning sketches, or taking photos.  But I've been thinking about jumping back into the blog and today... maybe I still have a reader or two.

This afternoon I ran through the rain.  I used to say I'd never run in the rain, that I didn't like running that much.  The change in attitude doesn't reflect a change in my attitude about running so much as a change in my attitude about rain.  Rain!  Just after Memorial Day, I spend a late May day hiking in the rain with forty 5-6th graders.  When I say hiking in the rain, I don't mean a sprinkle here or there.  I mean it poured from when we left at 9 am until we returned to our campsite at 4 pm.  I mean we were strategizing how to build our ark out of materials available in the forest in case the water never stopped coming down.  I mean that my fingers and toes turned to prunes and my raingear was breached before lunch and then I was just wet to the bone.  I mean we worried that we wouldn't have food for dinner because we had to cook it over a fire, and fires tend not to like water.  And I should mention that it was really fairly chilly, too... so I wished and wished that it would stop raining, and I could just be dry and warm.

Little did I know.  That was the last rain I saw for over a month.  In June, we got less than an inch, total, which came in just two afternoons with brief showers that hardly even soaked into the parched clay earth.  Every day the seven day forecast was "sunny, hot."

I recognize I don't need to tell anyone this.  The drought that's affecting more than half the country is all over the news, pictures of farmers inspecting crispy brown corn plants.  We've all seen the established trees and shrubs turning an unprecedented brown.

So this has been a week to celebrate.  I celebrate the showers that have fallen each morning, not for terribly long, but long enough, and they come day after day.  I celebrate the lush green prairies, the morning dew, the wet grass, the prism of sunlight as I stare at the fat drops clinging to the blades of grass.  I celebrate not having to water the vegetables day after day, and almost needing to actually mow the re-greening lawn.  I celebrate the spectacular and diverse cloudscapes that have filled the wide sky each day, with fluffy cumulonimbus and whispy cirrus and everything in between, catching the sun's light.  I celebrate for the dragonflies whose mosquito prey has emerged this week for the first time all summer, and for all the creatures whose thirst has been satisfied.

We call water the liquid of life... It is water that sustains earth, that makes this third planet from the sun the one -- the perfect one -- the one with the right conditions for the right things to happen for millions, billions of ears -- to allow us to be here.  Water, frozen and liquid, has shaped our land.  It fills our cells.  I quenches our parched throats and our dried-up souls.  The subject of poetry and picture.  Of course we all appreciate water and we all take water and its availability for granted.  But maybe a little less so now.

The prairies have weathered the drought better than lawns and gardens and farms.  (Duh, native plants are adapted to live here and prairie plants especially are known for their long roots and small rough leaves, all adaptations to dry hot summers...)  But they look especially lovely with the dust washed off... compass plants tower over the grasslands, their yellow crowns affirming their status as king of July.  Brown-eyed Susans, their adoring cousins, crowd beneath them.  Grasses are starting to flower, their tiny blooms not so eye-popping, but fascinating and colorful if you stop to look at them.  Blazing stars are purple exclamation points, excitement in the green and yellow.  Ironweed, indigo seed pods, milkweed seed pods, coneflowers yellow and purple... And that's just a small taste of the biodiversity that's out there.

Random note:  harvested my first tomatoes today -- twelve of them!

Well, welcome back!  I'll try not to stay gone so long again.

Going Backwards...

We had a freeze and a hard frost last night for the first time since... I don't know, February?  The last time it happened, it was early enough that I didn't even take note of it because we all assumed we'd see more of it.  And then we had a frost-free March.  Anyhow, this one may have damaged some stuff, because things came up early and were really far along and then it went down to the low 20s... we'll see!  Supposed to do the same tonight, I think.

Our Mammoth Trip

Our trip to Kentucky was all about flowers.  I mean, sure, there was the cave, which, being the longest in the world and home to unique species, is the natural wonder for which the National Park was created... but we all know I'm a plant person.  

The trees gave a spectacular show.  Even before we got to Kentucky it started.  In northern Indiana, the oak trees had dangling flowers that completed the green haze of spring.  Redbuds lined the highway, their brilliant purple coloring our whole drive.  As we got further south and the roadsides became more wooded and less farmed, the redbud understory intermingled with dogwoods, with their showy bracts and distinctive horizontal branching pattern... there's something about the southland in the springtime, and this?  Is it. 

My dogwood sketch.  I wrote, "Dogwoods decorate the forest.  From afar, each looks like a perfect ornament -- open towards the sky.  up close, each bloom is slightly asymmetrical, bracts twisted and misshapen and bruised."

Another dogwood sketch.

 Exploring the forests above the caves, we noticed distinctive burgundy flowers hanging like bells from many small trees.  We didn't know, at first, what they were... and neither did any of the rangers that we asked, and  we asked several.  (In their defense, I think Mammoth Caves hires their rangers based on geological knowledge, not botanical...)  Leaves weren't much help as they were just emerging, translucent and tiny ad the terminals of the twigs.  Turns out, these were pawpaw flowers!  Very lovely and unique.

My Pawpaw sketches and description.

We also saw a number of ground-dwelling wildflowers, including but probably not limited to:
bellwort, bluebells, celandine poppies, chickweed, Dutchman's breeches, fire-pink, foamflower, forget-me-nots, ginger, irises, jack-in-the-pulpit, larkspur, Mayapples (not blooming yet), phlox, pussytoes, ragwort, rue anenomes, trillium (multiple species), twinleaf (not blooming), violets, wild geranium, something I didn't know maybe a snakeroot...

Update

Today:
Serviceberry flowers, first lilac flowers opened (literally while I was watching, they weren't open this morning and then at lunch they were!) and rain, rain, rain all day long!  But a nice, warm rain...

Rights of Spring

Pasqueflowers

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech." -- Aldo Leopold


In other news, this afternoon a storm came through -- presumably the start of a cold front -- bringing much needed rain after over a week of dry heat.  Sheets of rain poured down, and afterwards the smell of spring was in the air.  Delicious!

Can't Keep Up!

Things are happening so fast out there that if I had enough time to blog every single day, it still wouldn't be enough.  I'd need to blog every hour to keep up with all the changes.  we're supposed to get some cooler weather starting tomorrow, so maybe that'll put the brakes on.

The bloodroot, which started to flower on Sunday,
can't handle the heat (perhaps) and by today have
dropped their petals!

We're at that point where, if you look across a field at a tree line or forest, the whole thing takes on a lime green glow... a haze of tiny leaf-outs and tree flowers in the springiest of greens just hangs there.  Our catalpa has started leafing out.  Maples are all flowering now, including the green-yellow flowers of sugar and Norway maples.  Serviceberries look green... everything is just popping out green.  Meanwhile, here are some blooming updates... though I apologize for the photos, I couldn't really see the screen too well and didn't realize they weren't coming out!  Plus, I'm at the stripey-world computer.

Our sedges are flowering rather strikingly.

Blurry celandine poppies bloomed this morning!  So lovely...

Mag-Nificent

We say goodbye to winter with another 80 degree day.  I heard on NPR, we've broken a record for the most consecutive days in March over 70, today being the 7th... and tomorrow and Wednesday look like they'll be then 8th and 9th.

Magnificent Magnolia

Today:  Magnolias of all sorts bloomed where yesterday there were only seriously swollen buds.