Author: importFromPhenologyOfEastWoods

In the backyard the garlic is several inches high. It snuck up on me, until I noticed Wednesday morning that it had gone from nothing to forming darts in the garden beds. I hate to miss a day outside right now. February, I can read for a few days and not worry about it. The world is moving around in February–squirrels dart out to get food and scamper back up their tree, seeds scutter across the surface of the snow–but it make a lot of headway. Now, on the other hand, everything is moving forward, with or without us. I was occupied for a few days at the beginning of the week, and I got an email from a colleague Monday evening with photos of prairie trillium foliage and Hepatica in bloom. The day was in the low 70s, and it looks as though all the woodland wildflowers gained a couple of inches. This week, the forest floor became hairy with false mermaid. It is everywhere, this plant that I used to think of as a rarity (in Dane County, I guess it is). My bike ride in is like a trip along the spine of a chia pet. The onions lining the maintenance road are up to the top of my calves. The redbud is not yet in flower, but the floral buds on the branches are swelling up like moles on the side of your neck. Jewelweed seedlings are pushing out nickel-sized cotyledons. Wild leek leaves are flattening out and starting to resemble dogs’ tongues. Sugar maple buds are expanded about as far as they can go without shattering, the scales leathery-brown at the tips, black near the base, the leaves papery emerging from the scales. Ironwood leaves are pushing their tipmost bud scales off. American beech end buds are about an inch and a half long, sharp-pointed, the scale margins whitish-translucent, leaves just peeking out. Black walnut leaves are stretching their legs, sickly yellow-green. Black cherry buds are as long as my pinky nail. Buckthorn leaves are a centimeter long already, adorable, if I didn’t know what they were.

On my bike-ride in on Thursday morning, I stopped beside the road just east of the spruce plot, where I found these things:

• toothwort completely unfurled, about to flower;
• bloodroot flowers shattering, petals falling;
• prairie trillium in floral bud;
• Dutchman’s breeches, the flowers still in bud, not yet forming pants;
• young shoots on woodland phlox, aniseroot [or something that reminds me of it; on looking back at this, I’m not sure I got the identification right, so please ring in if you have alternative thoughts], Virginia waterleaf and great waterleaf, false rue anemone, wild geranium, and early buttercup;
• fiddleheads of a Cystopteris;
• white bear sedge shoots at last overtopping last year’s evergreen leaves.

Twelve of these thirteen species I hadn’t seen any evidence of this spring before that stop. I went from there to the Big Rock Visitor Station and walked east, past fresh leaves on the silky wild rye and prickly gooseberry with leaves bigger than my thumbnail. This time a week earlier they were emerging tentatively. There were basal leaves of willowherb in the watercourse that passes under road. I turned south into the spruce plot, skirting the west edge of it. A clone of mayapples stood shin-high, umbrellalike, still closed, some barely starting to open, the tips white against the green leaves. On the south facing slopes of the ravines, the false rue anemone bore pale floral buds, while the true rue anemone was in glorious full bloom. Spring beauty petals were emerging from the buds. Some of the Dutchman’s breeches were looking particularly pantsy. Pennsylvania sedge was tipped with dark-scaled inflorescences, the scales white on the margins. Soon they will be fringed with yellow anthers. Watch for them, little flags in the forest understory.

I walked out through the maple collection. There were phoebes and song sparrows calling. I passed yarrow leaves and Kentucky bluegrass along the service road, then I stopped at the smallest of the three little ponds nestled into the kettles between the heritage trail and the road. I poked along the edge looking for things coming up. In the water I thought I saw duckweed, pale, floating to the surface. As I leaned in closer, I realized I was seeing not duckweed but sedge fruits, the dark achenes inside shrouded in the whitish perigynia. They were flat, pointed at the tip, thin scales, the fruit of Carex tribuloides, which happened to be greening up and hanging over the edge of the pond. The perigynia were massed up on top of the white oak leaves suspended beneath the pond surface, worn down by water and time. Further along the edge of the pond, fowl manna grass was brightening up the shoreline and the reed canary grass was shin-high. A white-throated sparrow sang.

Saturday, Rachel and I took the dog to Maple Grove Forest Preserve and found wild ginger leaves cutting their way up through the leaf litter, still folded. The wild leeks had spread, and I think they are more abundant this year than I’ve seen in the past two. There were a few flowers on the false rue anemone, and the exotic Siberian squill was flowering here and there all through the woods. Trout lily leaves were unfolding to show the mottling on the inner surfaces. The dog and I returned this morning in the snow to find white flowers about to open on a few of the trout lilies. Blue cohosh shoots were growing to six inches, and I found a shorter one with floral buds forming greenish at the top. Carex hirtifolia is three inches long in blue-green bunches along the trails. The burdock leaves are about as big as playing cards.

As I’m writing this the snow has turned to rain and back to snow, the dog and the boys are sleeping, and I’m thinking over a public symposium my colleagues Pat Herendeen and Rick Ree and I hosted yesterday at the Field Museum, on the topic of gene flow in plants. The recurring theme? Genes are shuttling back and forth between species on almost every branch of the tree of life. Yet we still look around and see so much diversity, all these friends of ours coming back in the woods spring after spring, and every one of them its own individual. Blue cohosh. Pennsylvania sedge. Ironwood. We still think of species as individuals. I think everyone in the room agreed that this is a big question for the coming decade: Why do we still have so many different species when the potential for gene flow is so high, and gene flow is going on all the time? And yet we do.

For good measure, I’ll leave with you with the poem “Swallows,” by Kathleen Jamie, whom I learned about Friday afternoon from Josh Mabie:

I wish my whole battened
heart were a property
like this, with swallows
in every room–so at ease

they twitter and preen
from the picture frames
like an audience in the gods
before an opera

and in the mornings
wheel above my bed
in a mockery of pity
before winging it

up the stairwell
to stream out into light

Enjoy the week.

---

Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Achillea millefolium – yarrow
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Arctium sp. – burdock
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge (is this really a common name?)
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex tribuloides – sometimes called awl-fruited sedge, but most sedges don’t really have common names
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Cercis canadensis – redbud
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Cystopteris protrusa – lowland brittle fern
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Elymus villosus – silky wild rye
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Epilobium sp. – willowherb
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily, adder’s tongue
• Fagus americana – American beech
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Glyceria sp. – fowl manna grass
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Hydrophyllum virginianum – Virginia waterleaf
• Impatiens capensis – jewelweed
• Juglans nigra – black walnut
• Osmorhiza longistylis – aniseroot
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Phalaris arundinacea – reed canary grass
• Phlox pilosa – woodland fern
• Poa pratensis – Kentucky bluegrass
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Prunus serotina – black cherry
• Ranunculus fascicularis – early buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Ribes cynosbati – prickly gooseberry
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Scilla siberica – Siberian squill
• Thalictrum thalictroides – meadow rue
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium, bloody butcher

Spring in the forest understory recalls weekend mornings of my childhood, when I would wake up early on a Saturday morning to get to the Menominee River while there was no one out yet, while my parents were perhaps turning over in bed upstairs, resisting getting up for a few more minutes. That hour of quiet before the day started was entirely my own, and the river was my own, for that hour. Soon the grown-ups would be up, and then it was everyone’s. But for the time being, I, like the forest understory before the leaves emerge on the tree, had the world to myself.

We’re in the first week of April, hanging for a moment before the pandemonium of warm temperatures and warblers and spring wildflowers blooming around every corner. The false mermaid is sparsely everywhere. It’s putting on height right now, scraggly in the bare soil of ephemeral watercourses, overtopping the mottled sheets of oak and sugar maple leaves. In a week or so it will carpet the woods. Spring beauty floral buds are clustered tight as chipmunks’ fists, and the foliage is fully grown. Last week, I hadn’t found it flowering yet, perhaps because it was still too cold. I worried that it had tired itself out by starting to flower in December… I’m relieved to find that I was probably wrong. In a week or two we’ll find beds of it. The sedges are greening up. Carex rosea and C. radiata and C. pensylvanica form bouquets of narrow shoots an inch tall or so. Sprengel’s sedge shoots are as long as my pinky, stout for now; by midsummer its leaves will bend over and crease in the middle, and it will be a sprawling mess. Virginia bluebell leaves are swelling up, and their petioles are starting to show… a week ago, they were just clusters of orbiculate blades. Trout-lily leaves are a couple of inches tall, grasslike, mottling barely evident unless you open the infolded leaves. In some, the corm is exposed at the soil’s surface, and it really does look like a tooth. I’m not sure it looks like a dog tooth as much as a child’s tooth, but perhaps “dogtooth violet” sounds better than “child’s tooth violet.” A couple more weeks now the trout-lily flowers will be floating at shoelace level along the trails.

The trees awaken more slowly than the understory. Basswood buds have begun to swell, but the leaves must be delicious, for under the trees there are none to be found. One basswood along the Heritage Trail has been scraped up by a buck. Silver maples in our neighborhood went from flowers just opening on March 31 to fully flowering on April 3. Some of the shrubs are a bit faster: first leaves started appearing on gooseberry and black raspberry last weekend. Along the edge of the trail are last year’s puffballs and bird’s nest fungi. Scraping the leaves aside in search of Dutchman’s breeches on Wednesday, I crushed a stump puffball that had swelled up in August of last year, and still a cloud of brown spores floated off as the puffball broke open. Last year’s dark leaves of C. jamesii and C. albursina are still more prominent than the young shoots beside them. Evergreen white avens leaves as big as the leaves of potted begonias are resting here and there on the leaf litter.

The warm days and cold nights at the beginning of the week frothed up the upper surface of the soil and then froze it in place, forming ice crystals several millimeters long that sloughed off at a touch. Below the icy crust grew gardens of seedlings, and white fungal mycelia spread across the moist, granular soil surface beneath. But that may be the end of it, because after Monday night, temperatures didn’t go below freezing again, and Wednesday morning was sweatshirt-cool but beautiful. Spring peepers and chorus frogs were singing from the kettle ponds on both sides of the south loop of the Heritage trail. The chorus frogs in the pond to the north seemed to be cooler, droning a slow, methodical rattle in comparison to the higher pitched creaking of the frogs in the southern pond. I was reminded of a lecture I once heard in which an experiment was performed on pairs of frogs. One was warmed, its potential mate cooled, and because of the temperature difference between them, the female did not recognize the male’s song. Could the temperature difference on the opposite sides of this hill serve to isolate the populations, or at least reduce gene flow between them?

What else? Tree swallows are patrolling the birdhouses in the field west of Big Rock. Poison hemlock is spreading out in the marshes where the false mermaid leaves off. Reed canary grass is greening up. Golden Alexanders are coming up in the garden. I found my first tick of the season on Wednesday, and a colleague reports that she found three the previous week. Gnats are bouncing around at the south edge of the spruce plot. I find myself this week waiting to see what happens next, seeing if I can remember. Where is it that I saw the hepatica last year? When do the yellow-rumped warblers show up? Is that the lisping of a golden-crowned kinglet or some other little bird I’ve forgotten? My enjoyment of spring is tied up with the joy of recalling things I thought I’d forgotten: an old name, a friend from high school, a trip we took… then a photo falls out of the album and suddenly I’m back there again. It’s the same thing in the woods, with wildflowers I know from New York and Wisconsin and Michigan. I have been reading David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell the past two weeks, and Joni Mitchell’s extravagent and ambitious “Paprika Plains” has been running through my mind:

It fell from midnight skies
It drummed on the galvanized
In the washroom, women tracked the rain
Up to the make-up mirror
Liquid soap and grass
And Jungle Gardenia crash
On Pine-Sol and beer
It’s stifling in here
I’ve got to get some air
I’m going outside to get some air

Back in my hometown
They would have cleared the floor
Just to watch the rain come down!
They’re such sky oriented people —
Geared to changing weather
I’m floating off in time
I’m floating off
I’m floating off in time.

It’s late as I write this. The boys and the dog and I have been running in different directions today, and everyone’s wired, having a hard time falling asleep. I take the dog out one last time, and we stand together beside the house in the warm, damp night. We are listening to teenagers chatting several houses away. We are smelling the next-door neighbor’s spent fire. The dog is paying attention to something across the street. Then I realize I am hearing chorus frogs floating faintly in from the south, from blocks away. Where are they? Why haven’t I ever heard them before from our house? For just a moment, at the end of this first week of April, I feel as though I were lifting up above the neighborhood, following the ditches and creeks that fill up along the roads and disappear into storm sewers all over town, floating off to springs of the past 30 years, all a little different, all similar.

---

Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex jamesii – James’s sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex radiata
• Carex rosea
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Conium maculatum – poison hemlock
• Erythronium albidum – trout-lily
• Floerkea prosperpinacoides – false mermaid
• Geum canadense – white avens
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Phalaris arundinacea – reed canary grass
• Ribes cynosbati – gooseberry (there are others; this is the one referenced in this post)
• Rubus occidentalis – black raspberry
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Zizia aurea – golden Alexanders

March is the month of first shoots in the forest understory. Wild garlic pierces the matted leaf litter. False mermaid sprouts emerge around the edges of sugar maple leaves. Spring beauty sprawls beneath oak leaves blown up against the tree trunks or escaped from the spring fires out in the expanses between the trees, fragile white petioles spreading into green, delicious, straplike leaves. Dandelion and wild lettuce and orchard grass green up along the trail. Rosettes of annual bedstraw push up through curling browned leaves while their cotyledons stay down below and are forgotten or, by most, never known, eclipsed by the cleaving tangle of stems and foliage that will scramble over the forest floor in the coming weeks. Wild leek leaves show up, at first folded inside bluish translucent sheaths, tips bent over, then spreading as the sheaths tear open along the edges and the leaves fill with water and harden like wings of a newly emerged cicada. Virginia bluebell foliage erupts.

This is the season when evergreen leaves begin mothering in then giving way to spring shoots. The woodland sedges have mostly been green all winter long, but now they get a jump start on the summer. Two weeks ago, white bear sedge was sending up light green shoots from evergreen rosettes. Pennsylvania sedge seems to be greening up all over, not just the slender young tillers, but even the leaves that overwintered, aside of course from the brown foliage reclining at the base. This year’s shoots of Carex tribuloides are sprouting from the nodes of last year’s fallen vegetative culms, provisioned by the mother plant until they get their toes into the soil. Perhaps it is their evergreenness that gives carices an advantage in the woods, where they dominate the graminoid understory. They green up rapidly even after a fire or deer browsing: staying active under the snow, capturing what light is available when you can, may help them get started in the spring. Winter leaves of white avens and strawberry are still photosynthesizing, but they are passing the baton to the sprouts beneath, which will become next year’s evergreen foliage. The woodland asters are holding out before they send up this year’s shoots.

I am a Madison naturalist at heart, so I still think of March 1 as the day the cranes come back, even though it’s a day or two earlier down here. This year, the first cranes started coming through in late February, and last weekend’s flocks over DuPage County were the largest in my memory. Robbie Q. Telfer reported that at least one flock was a mix of sandhill and whooping cranes. Chorus frogs have been singing, and Friday afternoon I heard spring peepers on my bike ride home. Two weeks ago I noticed the first seedlings of false mermaid in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, only a few days later than I noticed them in 2018, along with a few sprawling shoots of spring beauty. This is the month for woodcocks (which I haven’t heard yet this year for lack of walking around at the right time) and song sparrows (which are everywhere right now), for robins to be noisy in the morning and spend their afternoons flipping over fallen leaves in search of insects, for phoebes to return: I heard my first along the DuPage River on Friday morning. It is the month for catkins to expand and silver maple flowers to bloom, black cherry buds to swell. Among the familiarities, March always bring new friends as well. This year, I saw Mnium or some closely related moss bristling with sporophytes in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, and I learned a species I probably should have known years ago: winter aconite, a buttercup relative from Eurasia that has been planted at the Arboretum since at least the 1970s, but known as an escapee in northeastern Illinois only since the unseasonably warm spring of 2012 (via herbarium records as well as discussion in Wilhelm and Rericha’s Flora of the Chicago Region). It is a beauty, but as a relatively new weed it’s one to keep our eyes on.

And for parents of school-age students, March is the month of spring break. I find the week off with my family often coincides with transitions in my work projects as well, and this year was no exception. As a consequence, it’s a time for me to clear my mind. My family and I spent a few days in Boston. We visited the magnificent glass plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. We spent a morning prowling the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, where Rachel pointed out to me the oak trees in Jan Moy’s (16th Century) tapestry “Queen Tomyris rejects Cyrus’s proposal of marriage”. I spent a day with colleagues at the Arnold Arboretum. Perhaps the best part of the trip was our morning at the MIT museum, where we stumbled across an exhibit of kinetic sculptures by Arthur Ganson. They are intricate machines built of hand-wrought gears and screws, pulleys and levers, welded to objects that we might toss out: torn paper, an artichoke petal, an abandoned baby doll, a broken miniature chair. These things come to life as the gears turn, and your attention is riveted as you watch them move. A wishbone lumbers across the table. A platter of uncooked black-eyed peas rolls like the sea. The mundane becomes miraculous.

March awakens me every year, revisiting old themes and presenting me with a few surprises.

---

Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex jamesii – James’s sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex tribuloides – sedge
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Corylus americana – hazelnut
• Eranthis hyemalis – winter aconite
• Floerkea prosperinacoides – false mermaid
• Fragaria virginiana – strawberry
• Galium aparine – cleavers, annual bedstraw
• Geum canadense – white avens
• Lactuca – lettuce
• Prunus serotina – black cherry
• Symphyotrichum drummondii – Drummond’s aster
• Taraxacum officinale – dandelion

Sunday afternoon the dog and I went to Maple Grove Forest Preserve, where we found the bridge over St. John’s Creek slick with ice. In fact every trail was, even the chipped trail down from the parking lot, where I would have thought the melting snow would soak in. The dog was afraid to cross the bridge, and I carried her across. On the other side she had a stand-off with an abandoned sled that involved raised hackles and a little growling, and we scooted down the trail to the west and north. The snow was falling lightly. Woodpeckers and blue jays were calling. At one point the dog’s legs slid out from underneath her and she splayed out on the trail like a cartoon dog on ice. Beside her sprawling body were the tracks of a squirrel who had bounded by less than an hour or two earlier, without so much as slipping, and up the slope to the west. How was it possible to run at full tilt without slipping on this ice when we were falling just walking across it?

Last week I was in Madison to give a lecture on our prairie work. There was a storm the night before I spoke, and the whole city was glazed with ice. After speaking, then lunching with old friends, then catching up with a colleague about data, I took a walk out through the northeast corner of Curtis Prairie to Teal Pond, thence to Gallistel Woods and Wingra Woods. At the south edge of Gallistel Woods, a pileated woodpecker flew off. How common have they become? I remember decades ago watching one excavate a nest on the West Grady Knoll for several days before he disappeared, and thinking that would be the end of it, the last I’d see a pileated woodpecker in Madison. When I returned to give a lecture years later I heard one again.

I walked these trails for many years as a ranger and naturalist and know them well, but they seemed to have stretched out in a few places. I walked past planted sweet birches and hemlocks in Wingra Woods to the skunk cabbages emerging from the springy soil at Skunk Cabbage Bridge. There must have been a dozen of them, though I couldn’t get close enough to count them all. I walked out past the Indian mounds and the planted yellow birches. I picked up my car, took a few photos and got a cup of coffee on the way out of town, then drove back to Downers Grove.

As I drove, I listened to Slaughterhouse Five, which I’d somehow never read. How had I missed this? Isn’t it required reading anywhere it isn’t banned? I was particularly taken with this passage, in which Billy Pilgrim has been kidnapped by extraterrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore and given a book in their language to read. He of course can’t read it, but he can see that it is “laid out in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.” Here one of the Tralfamadorians explains the structure of a novel in their language:

“… each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

As I write this, one week has ended and the next is about to begin. There are papers to write and students to meet with, the dog sleeping beside my chair and my family sleeping upstairs. Fats Waller has finished playing, Carol King and Joni Mitchell are echoing in my mind. There are cupcakes on the counter and a fresh snow outside. I have a good feeling about the coming week.

Winter gave us a break from routine this week. Monday we had a sloppy snow, and the kids were off of school. Travel was crummy. The next day, temperatures dropped to 0 F, and we all braced for Tuesday and Wednesday, which we’d already been warned would drop below -20 F. Temperatures went as low as predicted, and for two days everyone retired to their homes as best they could. We wrote, we played games, we watched movies, we caught up on correspondence, we cooked and ate. We stole outside for a few minutes at a time, putting Vaseline on our faces and the pads of the dog’s paws. Thursday morning I sat in our back room and watched Jupiter and Venus rise with the moon suspended between them. When the sun came up, we boiled a cup of water and whipped it into the air to watch it evaporate instantly into a cloud of vapor.

Friday we returned to work and school. We’d had a dusting of snow overnight, and the East Woods was filled with tracks. Animals seemed to be as stir-crazy as the humans. A mouse had run haywire, inscribing loops in the snow at the west edge of woods. It looked as though it had been scared by something, a hawk or owl perhaps, but I saw no evidence of an actual scuffle. Not ten steps away was a fallen log with a mouse pathway beneath, running straight, directly under the shadow of the log. Squirrels had come down from their trees to excavate a cache and gone straight back up. Things like this–the efficiency of a straight-there-straight-back route–make me think that squirrels must remember where their caches are. A cocoon of what I take to be a cecropia moth hung in a tree. How do they make it all the way through the winter?

At a distance of about 60 feet I saw a fox beneath a fallen tree, hunkered over something. I couldn’t get a photo before it was gone. Underneath the tree, however, there was a dead animal where the fox had been, what I take to have been a rabbit. Tracks were evident in the snow leading up to where the ball of fur lay. I followed the fox tracks westward out of the woods but didn’t see the fox again. Undoubtedly it was back to eating within a few minutes after I was gone, unnoticed, at peace to devour its quarry (or perhaps just its find) as visitors continued skiing, walking, chatting on the trails that pass by.

Saturday, temperatures kept rising. The snow was perfect for packing when Rachel and our younger son and I returned to the East Woods to find fleshy crowded parchment and turkey tail fungi on the exposed roots of a downed tree. Sunday, in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, the snow was melted even further, capturing the nuances of tracks inscribed from the night before. Skunk tracks intersected the trail here and there, and it makes me wonder now whether there is a chance the animal I tracked two weeks ago that I concluded had to be a raccoon might actually have been a skunk. No photos, but the claws and gait together suggest to me a skunk, not a raccoon.

During my walk at Maple Grove, I stood by St. Joseph Creek watching shards of ice breaking from the edge of the creek and sliding beneath the ice that was still frozen to the edge. They made a soft, scraping sound, like a water cracker being dragged across the surface of an unglazed ceramic plate. Some fragments disappeared, but others would pop out from under the ice and the sound would immediately stop, as the ice floated downstream toward Lisle. Chickadees and nuthatches were calling. For a few minutes, there were no papers to be written, no data to analyze. It seemed, briefly, that everything was in order.

As I post this I am turning back to the week’s work, and the moment brings to mind this passage from Seneca (Letter CVIII): “I’m going to tell you how this enthusiasm for learning… is to be brought under control if it isn’t going to stand in its own way. What is wanted is neither haphazard dipping nor a greedy onslaught on knowledge in the mass. The whole will be reached through its parts, and the burden must be adjusted to our strength. We mustn’t take on more than we can manage. You shouldn’t attempt to absorb all you want to — just what you’ve room for; simply adopt the right approach and you will end up with room for all you want.” I often think of this passage when I am trying to balance projects. Oddly, I have misremembered it as being a passage about how many books one has to read, or mixed it up with a similar excerpt from Seneca that is about having too many books to read.

In your lifetime, you get a finite number of moments like this that you then draw on for decades: the fox beneath the fallen tree; ice scraping its way downstream; skunk tracks crossing the trail in the wet snow; the bitter cold. It is remarkable how short these moments are and how much they mean to us.

Bitter cold came in on Thursday and looks as though it will stick around for a week. Everyone is saying that it’s finally winter. Don’t we say that every year? It seems a year doesn’t go by that we don’t remark on how variable spring is and how winter cold comes later than we expect it to. I realize climate is changing, but I also think Midwesterners love to talk about how unpredictable the weather is. My Ohio grandma used to write the temperature alongside the date at the tops of her letters. She would report on the weather and the soybeans in one paragraph, my grandpa’s circulation in the next, a poem I had sent her in the paragraph after that. The weatherman stood right alongside Cid Corman in her book.

But before the cold came, we had a day of sloppy rain, and the snow became all crusted over. Our dog could practically walk over the top of it. The squirrel excavations were ice caves. Friday afternoon I walked out through the East Woods wearing two hats and a hood and was happy to have them all. A line of about 60 geese headed south as I walked uphill into the Korea Collection. It was snowing lightly, and the white-footed mice and squirrels had started leaving soft-edged tracks. I meandered eastward up a ravine paralleling the main trail, watching the snow drifting down slowly, into the marsh where I’d watched the woodcock dance earlier this spring. A marcescent Hill’s oak stood at the edge of the marsh under a tall white oak (or was it a bur oak? I knew I’d forget if I didn’t write it down). To the east, just across the road, an impressive white oak arches over the trail, which I confess I’d never given much thought to. In the snow, it was magnificent, a gateway to the east woods. The bark was packed with ice and glazed with lichens, which left me wondering how much the freezing and thawing must pry flakes of bark from the tree as it ages, weakened by the Aleurodiscus oaksii and lichens, wedged off by the expanding ice.

I passed the marcescent post oaks (Quercus stellata) in the oak collection. In the East Woods, there were lichens and mosses on the exposed tree trunks. The bark of the larger sugar maples (Acer saccharum) has a whitish, chalky appearance that I’m certain I’ve noticed before, but that struck me especially on this walk. Perhaps this is also a lichen. I will ask Jerry Wilhelm about it this week.

Near the far east end of the woods I was drawn to a honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) that had been broken in a storm. This was a freshly broken tree, no time yet to rot, though I suspect decomposers showed up within hours to survey the situation and consider their options. The exposed wood was clean, bright against the backdrop of the forest. By contrast, a few minutes down the trail there stood a greatly excavated and largely decomposed red oak (Quercus rubra) that appears to have served insects up to as many chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, hairy and red-breasted and pileated woodpeckers as I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s remarkable to think of how much a tree contributes from the moment its main shoot expires to the day it is unrecognizable as ever having been a tree. By dint of its size and the slowness of its decomposition, surely more than a person.

Saturday, snow started before sunset and continued into the night. The flakes were enormous, light, cottony, like something shed from the sky, not like water that fell from the clouds and crystallized on its way down. We awoke Sunday to a clear sky, the east just lighting up, Jupiter swinging up above Venus’s left shoulder, the moon high in the southwest four steps from the planets. The snow had remarkable loft. Our garlic and the forest floor couldn’t ask for softer insulation against today’s low of zero and Wednesday’s forecast negative twenty Fahrenheit.

The snow in Maple Grove Forest Preserve was phenomenal, snowflakes linking arms to extend, light and fluffy, inches off of the branches to which they were clinging. As I crossed the bridge over St. Joseph Creek, I noticed tracks along the icy margin of the creek that I could not put a finger on. I tried as one often does to make them into something plausible. A little coyote? But the gait was all wrong. The footprints went from alternating to right next to each other, and I suspected raccoon. But shouldn’t they all be torpid on a cold day like this? I followed the plodding path south through the woods, around trees and along a fallen log. The route was deliberate if not entirely direct: while there was weaving, and the walk along the top of the log seemed a bit gratuitous, the animal seemed hardly to have stopped along its trail. There were mouse tunnels through the snow here and there, leading to crystal-edged holes where the mouse had dived in. Beneath a log, there were especially clear and very fresh tracks running back and forth before they disappeared into a crack in the log, leaving a dusting of wood crumbs on the snow. The animal I was tracking didn’t so much as chase a mouse. That didn’t seem right for a coyote.

When the tracks I’d been following reached the drainage running laterally out toward the trail, they became clearer. I concluded they pretty well had to be raccoon. The gait–front foot next to the back foot, side by side–and relative size of the feet (big back foot next to a smaller front foot) are distinctive, and there was just enough clarity in the snow atop the frozen drainage to make this obvious. I had been avoiding this conclusion in part because I had assumed the raccoons would be asleep on a cold day like this. I may be wrong still about my identification, and I’ll welcome any opinions as to what animal this was. But for now, I think it’s likelier I was just mistaken about how raccoons behave. Like the spring beauty of early January, the raccoons may not be reading the books.

As I headed back toward the north end of the forest, a coyote inspected me from a distance and then moved on. I returned to the bridge where I’d initially seen the tracks I’d been following, and on second viewing, the raccooniness of them was hard to deny. Hoar frost had sprouted on the ice like mosses sculpted in porcelain. The water was bubbling beneath the ice and rushing along where the ice opened up as I walked out of the woods.

Later in the day, I was drawn to this paragraph from Simone Weil’s essay “Attention and Will”:

The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on the problem…. We must not want to find: as in the case of an excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of our efforts. We need an outward reward which chance sometimes provides and which we are ready to accept at the price of a deformation of the truth…. It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains a reward.

This is a strange paragraph to be drawn to as a scientist. Isn’t it problems that I am drawn to? Isn’t it answering questions that keeps pulling me forward? Consequently, isn’t the object of those questions precisely the thing that does the pulling? And if we are not to want to find, what is it we are to want to do? Yet this idea that the joy in our work comes from our work, purely, without expectation of any particular outcome (“not attached to an object”), seems to me to be right. I trail along after trees and raccoons, and it’s the looking that brings me pleasure. Perhaps this is what Weil is talking about, the same thing Teilhard de Chardin is saying in the introduction to Le phénomène humain when he writes, “To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence.” Just doing this, looking closely to try to see more clearly, trailing a raccoon through the woods or a conversation through someone else’s memories, is necessary. It’s part of what we’re here to do.

As I finish this up and get ready to go to work, we’ve gotten another several inches of snow. The schools have closed and our older son is thrilled. Rachel and I had our dog out for an hour and a half. While Rachel and I talked and walked, the dog ran everywhere, sniffing and bounding and watching and chasing us, the very picture of effort not fixed on a single object. It’s nice to have winter here, finally.

Last weekend’s thin layer of snow gave the mice and voles a little room for tunneling. Temperatures stayed at or below 30 degrees Farenheit from Saturday through Tuesday night, but Wednesday, they rose to just above freezing. The afternoon was bright and clear. I found a cranefly roosting on the snow beside an exposed branch in the East Woods. A snow that falls when it’s cold and is left untouched until a day like this is a blank canvas for animal tracks, capturing every toepad and brush of fur in perfect detail. Virginia opossum were particularly evident near the open west edge of the Korea Collection. Hartley Jackson describes the opossum’s gait as a “slow, heavy, plodding, and awkward… and ambling pace.” Opossums’ legs work in unison on each side–both left legs forward, then both right legs forward, then both left–turning the body back and forth as they walk. The effect is distinctive when the snow is the right depth, as their claws inscribe terse, repetitive arcs that run parallel to their line of travel. This, combined with the prominent opposable thumbs on the rear feet makes their tracks unmistakable.

White-footed or deer mice (Peromyscus spp.) tracks crossed the trails and darted through the woods. Peromyscus are readily identified by their galloping gait with the tail dragging between the legs. Their tunnels had begun to collapse in the melting snow, and I could follow them from tree to tree through the woods. In Madison, I had always thought of the meadow voles (Microtus) as the tunnel-formers, and perhaps they were, but I also saw Peromyscus a lot less there than I do in DuPage County.

Saturday morning, we awoke to several inches of snow, and the snow fell through midday. When I arrived at Maple Grove Forest Preserve, the snow was six to eight inches thick. It had drifted up in ridges off of fallen logs, in places higher than our dog, in other places scraped down to the leaf litter. In the floodplain along St. Joseph Creek, the American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), honewort, grasses and goldenrods were tipped over, their bodies shadowy under the snow up to the point where they emerged from it. I thought of Dante’s description of the 9th ring of hell, where the treacherous are trapped in a frozen lake, only their heads exposed above the ice:

And as the croaking frog sits with its muzzle
above the water, in the season when
the peasant woman often dreams of gleaning,

so, livid in the ice, up to the place
where shame can show itself, were those sad shades,
whose teeth were chattering with notes like storks’¹

The west side of the forest across the bridge was all sugar maple (Acer saccharum) saplings poking up through the snow. The snow was peppered with fallen debris from the trees: sugar maple samaras, needles from a homeowner’s Norway Spruce (Picea abies), bits of bark and white oak leaves. There were no animal tracks, save one: a gray squirrel had come down from a white oak to run across the snow, but the tracks evaporated about ten feet from the tree, erased as the wind blew snow into the divots left by the squirrel’s paws. Exposed leaves, pathways, I imagine, for mice, were protected from snow by the edges of fallen trunks.

Partially-hidden mushrooms were everywhere. There was a great white ash cloaked in turkey-tail fungus (Trametes versicolor) in the middle of the woods that I only noticed because there was no foliage to distract me. The ash was broken off about 7 feet above the surface of the ground, exposing creamy white outer layers of wood and zone lines demarcating the edges of fungal individuals. A few meters away, a white oak was covered in tiny, withered white cups of Aleurodiscus oakesii, the fungus that makes white oak bark slough off, scale-like. A shelf fungus of some kind (Ganoderma?) was shielded from the snow in the hollow at the base of a decaying stump in the marsh in the middle of the woods. The orange mycena and mosses I was watching two weeks ago are hidden under snow for now.

This past week, Mary Oliver passed away. In July, Rachel told me about Krista Tippett’s interview with Oliver. I had stopped reading Mary Oliver for several years, but this interview woke me up again. It turns out that she wrote “Wild Geese” as an “exercise in end-stopped lines.” This is one of the mysteries of art: true, beautiful things can arise from attention to the craft itself. She also wrote this, which I consider the most apt description of the writing I like best: “The poem is not a discussion, not a lecture, but an instance—an instance of attention, of noticing something in the world.”² As I was finding fungi under the snow and marcescent leaves of ironwood and red oak and white oak, I thought of Mary Oliver drafting her poems on foot, collecting food from the woods, returning to her desk to write. We are all lucky that she chose to write.

This morning, Venus was perched above Jupiter as the nearly-full moon was setting. The temperature was a few degrees above zero. I see that on the last morning of the month, Venus and the moon and Jupiter will all be lined up on the horizon in the hours before dawn. It’s one more thing to look forward to.

———–

¹ From Canto XXXII, Dante Alighieri, Translated by Allen Mandelbaum

² Mary Oliver. 1994. A Poetry Handbook. Harcourt Brace & Company, New York)

This past week, temperatures dropped from the 40s to the 20s. Biking through the East Woods, I noticed shelf fungi twenty feet up in dead trees, fallen stalks of touch-me-not (Impatiens spp.), mosses bright green on fallen logs and at the bases of trees, the whiteness of air trapped beneath ice in the puddles and waterways that run under the road. On Thursday, I talked for nearly an hour with Wayne Lampa about mosses. He agreed that mosses and evergreen sedges really are the brightest things in the woods now. I was reassured, because I am both color-blind and often attracted to details that turn out to be peripheral to the main action in a given context. These two personal attributes sometimes conspire to make me think that I am observing generalities when in fact I am noticing particularities or coincidences. But Wayne agreed: right now is the time for mosses in our woods, because they jump out at you against the pale brown leaves, on a cut stump at the trail’s edge or the upper surface of a decomposing log. Against my better judgment, and in spite of the raft of oak writing I need to get done in the next couple of months, I took a break that afternoon and checked out Ralph Pope’s Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts: A Field Guide to Common Bryophytes of the Northeast and Conard and Redfearn’s classic How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, which I think I once snagged at a booksale and then let go, unused, after several years.

This week, I realized there were egg cases of Chinese praying mantis (Tenodera sinensis) on the goldenrods in our back garden. Who knew? More praying mantises visited our garden this summer than we’d ever seen before, including one who systematically devoured a monarch butterfly as we watched (I would never have seen this if Rachel hadn’t called me out; the photos here I think are hers). Having egg cases in the backyard is icing on the cake. The dog started going for them, so I pulled them into the garage to overwinter. I’m hoping for 100s of mantids come summertime.

Snow started this morning. A cardinal and a few nuthatches were singing at 6:45 as Rachel and I walked the dog through Maple Grove. The snow continued through most of the day. When I returned for a walk at 3:30, the hill beside the forest was thick with kids sledding. Snow coated the east side of all the trees. The squirrels appeared to be waiting it out, holing up in their trees and descending only to excavate a cache. Squirrels are said to remember where they have cached their food¹, and the way that they were operating this afternoon in light of the snow leads me to believe it. The stems of calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum) are everywhere, glazed with snow, and sugar maples and wild leeks emerge above the snow’s surface throughout the woods. Musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana) leaves and privet berries are hanging on. The soil that a week ago was teeming with centipedes is frozen now, decorated with snow flakes.

Tonight I walked the dog in the backyard at about 8:30. Last night it was dark at this time, Orion overhead, and I had the lights strung along the side of our garage turned on so we could see as we took the dog out. Tonight, between the clouds above and the snow on the ground, it was light enough outside to read by. As the dog rolled in the snow, I thought of this passage from John Burroughs “The Pleasures of a Naturalist,” in Under the Maples:

… meadow mice… live on grass and roots and keep well hidden beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow coming out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls and hawks. Life then becomes a sort of picnic…. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat stones, and lead once more the life of fear.

In a few days there will be mouse and vole tracks to follow in the snow. For now, all is quiet, and I imagine the social life under the snow, rodents feeding on tubers and plant stems, bedding down under a translucent ceiling. Perhaps they are safer from owls and coyotes than they would be without the snow. Is it really the party down there that Burroughs makes it out to be? Years ago I saw a small grove of shrubs in Curtis Prairie at the UW Madison Arboretum that had been girdled under the snow while no one was watching. Perhaps the mice in Maple Grove Forest Preserve will feed on the spring beauty shoots and bulbs that I was wondering over last week. I look forward to watching their tunnels and trails appear over the coming days.
——————
¹ Jacobs LF, Liman ER. 1991. Grey squirrels remember the locations of buried nuts. Animal Behaviour 41: 103–110.

The afternoon before the winter solstice was warm and foggy, and it seems the unseasonably warm weather of the week or so before had tricked the spring wildflowers into action. Bullet-shaped mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) less than a centimeter high and sprawling, partially etiolated shoots of Virginia spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) were hiding under leaf litter at the base of the red oaks. The spring beauty particularly surprised me: the straplike leaves are unmistakable, and with them were the floral buds curled up like tiny fists, bunched together. I went back a week later and found them still there. Is this typical? Do spring beauty and mayapple typically persist under the snow all winter long? The husks of stump puffballs that I first noticed in August had turned honey-brown; fungal mycelia were frosting the woodchips underneath the leaf litter; a great horned owl was calling from the north edge of the woods. The brightest green in the woods was the moss (Entodon seductrix) covering a cut stump alongside the trail.

A Virginia opossum was patrolling the oak collection. I saw her from 30 feet off waddling behind one of the planted oaks and ran to get a photo, thinking she would race off. Instead, she climbed up the oak to eye level and watched me, casually, just keeping an eye on me. I got within about 5 feet and stopped shooting photos so I could get a proper look at her. She was in beautiful shape. I confess that opossums scare me a little: those sharp little teeth, and so many of them; the naked, ratlike tail; the divots out of their ears where they’ve been frostbitten and don’t even seem to mind… they’re tough animals! But this one was lovely, and it’s changed my thoughts about opossums a bit.

Temperatures dropped for the next four days, and Christmas eve day there were ice crystals 2 mm long in the upper layers of exposed soil at Maple Grove Forest Preserve. Oak leaves were frozen into a mat, but the soil beneath was merely cold, pliable like clay. Just after lunch, the soil in our garden was still frozen in the upper layers in the shady parts, mostly thawed in the sun. I turned over a four-by-four-foot section of garden and planted four rows of garlic that we had meant to plant two months ago. I mulched with pin oak leaves and leaves from our apple tree. Too tannic? perhaps… I never mulch the garden with oak leaves, but this year we had no straw left over from Halloween.

Since Christmas, temperatures have ranged from the high teens to the low 50s. The days are only 10 minutes longer than they were on the solstice, but cardinals have been singing as late as 9:30 in the morning. Orion is rising over the horizon as the sun goes down and stands upright in the south by 9:30 at night. Saturday morning it was just below freezing when Rachel and I took the dog to Maple Grove Forest Preserve. We found fiberlike ice crystals about an inch long just under the soil’s surface, cylindrical crystals packed together like bundles of straws, clear, pushing clods of soil up to make a ragged, brittle surface. By the afternoon, temperatures had risen to over 50 degrees. A small swarm of some species of gnat or midge (I think; I did not succeed in grabbing one or getting a good photo) was bouncing over the bridge through the margin of floodplain forest along St. Joseph Creek. For several minutes they traced a slender ellipse up and down over the handrail, sparkling like flecks of snow in the setting sun. The underside of a brick of rotten wood was glazed with minute frost crystals, but the ice crystals at the soil surface had mostly collapsed. At the bases of the trees, under dried piles of maple and oak leaves, full-sized centipedes tunneled through lawns of earthworm castings alongside mites and pill-bugs. Almost every spot where I pushed aside leaves, whether dried up at the bases of the trees or limp and matted over the soil surface, I found earthworm castings and centipedes. The centipedes must be active throughout the winter, any time the temperature rises, like the mourning cloaks who lie in wait under the bark or in crevasses of trees for the first warm days of spring, and emerge fully formed, ready for action.

There is more to see in the understory than I had expected. Evergreen sedges I knew I would find: Carex blanda, C. jamesii, the broad-leaved C. albursina, and most of the other woodland sedges maintain their late-season foliage under the snow throughout the winter, presumably photosynthesizing when they can. Carex sprengelii appears to be an exception to the rule, as the one in my garden is only a pale green at the base right now. The evergreens also include Hepatica, white avens (Geum canadense), many of the woodland ferns, and a few other understory herbs. These were no surprise. But two spring wildflowers I had not expected were also coming up: hidden in the white oak leaf litter was a fully developed leaf of false rue-anemone (Enemion biternatum) and the exposed bulb of another Virginia spring beauty, shoots emerging serpentlike from its crown. Again I ask myself, is this the norm? are there always spring herbs emerging in December and January? are the plants that emerge just in warmer spots? predisposed to earlier growth? a hair shallower than their classmates? just lucky, or unlucky as the case may be? And will the particular plants I’ve found survive to March, when I expect to start seeing them? I need to get some twist-ties to mark these plants for a revisit.

One small area of the forest floor was cleaned of leaves, exposing a clone of wild ginger. Scratched with a thumbnail, because I wasn’t certain I had the identification right, the rhizomes were pungent. The prostrate stems were tipped with leaf scales about the size of a fingernail; the lateral shoots were the size of a pencil eraser or perhaps a bit longer. Laid bare like this, the clone was easy to follow, rhizomes surfacing here and there like segments of a slender, many-armed creature swimming beneath the forest floor.

Further on, a large sugar maple had fallen onto the forest floor. The whole tree was spongy, soft and soaking wet, rotten brown. It was topped with a healthy, fresh-looking moss that was bristly with sporophytes. I presume these had opened in 2018, sending the spores off to the wind while the stalks (formally, setae) and capsules remained, like marcescent crabapple stems in midwinter. At one end of the tree trunk was scat of what I suspect was a red fox, nestled in fissures in the bark right at the broken base of the tree. Near the middle of the trunk was the husk of an acorn deposited, most likely, by a squirrel after eating the nut out. At the far end was a particularly fresh patch of orange mycena mushroom, as fleshy as if it were a rainy week in early September. Were they persisting all the way from late summer? or newly emerged from the rotten wood in an unseasonably warm week? On the hike out, I heard a great horned owl call.

In his essay “The Pleasures of a Naturalist,” John Burroughs wrote: “But the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to eye or ear. The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand.” I sometimes tire of quoting John Burroughs, but honestly, I don’t think anyone says it better than he does. In an hour and a half, I didn’t make it much more than a 1/4-mile down the trail; who captures that better than Burroughs? I don’t know.

That’s 2018, done. Is 2019 the year I get bored botanizing my own neighborhood? If this week is any indication, it’s not. I still have plenty to do right here.

Once a man brought me a story which began with a cut-off head which spoke. And I said to the man, “Isn’t it miracle enough that a head which is not chopped off can talk? — Isaac Bashevis Singer [1]

The snow was about a half-inch thick this morning when I headed over to Maple Grove Forest Preserve. Tussocks of Carex jamesii wore the snow as though they were wigs laid over half-buried rocks, and the tree branches and arching stems of calico aster looked as if they had been spread liberally with icing in the early hours. Ironwood and honeysuckle and marcescent canopy oaks are hanging onto their leaves, but the other trees have mostly let theirs fall. The shin-high sugar maple youngsters on the forest floor stand out in sharp relief against the white snow. The infructescences of wild leek seem to be mostly battered down, though perhaps I was just missing them. Golden-crowned kinglets, white-breasted nuthatches, and hairy woodpeckers were calling.

I brushed aside the leaves in search of false mermaid (Floerkea proserpinacoides). In Quebec, its seeds are reported to germinate in November or December, with leaf emergence in the spring [2]. I found shoots 1/4″ high under the leaf litter on March 14 this year, though they may have been up a bit earlier (I had taken an interest in the soil when it was freezing and thawing, but I believe I went a few weeks in March without paying attention to anything under the litter). I cleared out the leaves in about a dozen spots today where I recall the plants growing, but I found nothing. A few spots had a short seedling or two growing with very vanilla-looking cotyledons. I’m certain that’s not false mermaid, but I don’t know what it is. Do you have any ideas?

The snow is just wet enough to glaze the oak leaves on the trail, leaving the soil wet but not snowy. Squirrels are digging up acorns, perching on the branches to eat them. I trooped up the hill to the south, and as The Avery Coonley School showed up on my left I veered off-trail into the woods. Everything looks different off trail. Trails are designed to get you somewhere: when you walk off trail, you may daydream, but you walk through, not past. I don’t recall exactly what I saw, nor what I thought about, but I have these impressions: white oak trunks mottled with wet snow; broad leaves clinging to the hybrid honeysuckles; wilted, frozen nettles; goldenrods etched with snow; then, unaccountably, an opening with grasses, in a slough that I knew I shouldn’t have come across. I had walked without realizing it over one trail and dropped back down to the base of the hill, and came back across my own footsteps. How did that happen? I blame the snow.

When I returned home, my younger son was just waking up. We ate, and I had my coffee as he put his snowpants on and raced outside, stockpiled snowballs, waited for me. He came to the window several times and mouthed, “are you coming?” Five minutes is forever when you are young. When you are older, the days fly by. I brushed my teeth and we had a vigorous snowball fight for about an hour, then he and Rachel headed downtown for a morning at the Art Institute.

On my walk out of the forest preserve this morning, I thought about the fact that I am 48 this year, halfway to the age at which my great-grandfather Grover Cleveland Hendrix Hipp passed away. I think I’ve always aimed for 96. I consider the things I’ve done already and all the things I still want to do, and I am grateful that here, at my halfway point, on a snowy day like this, I can look forward to one more of these, one more stretch of 48 years, each packed with 12 months. 576 months! I don’t want to set the bar too low, but what if I were to do just one good thing each month? One thing worth remembering in that last year, when I may do more sitting than biking, and I can look back at 576 good things: a snowball fight with my younger son; canoeing with my older son; walking with my wife in the dark, in the early morning before the boys are awake, watching the moon set; being with my family, exploring the city or the woods or seeing a movie; walking around the woods, writing more of these, whatever these are; watching the garlic come up in the garden. Is that too humble a goal? Is that too little to want? Just to have that seems miracle enough.

——————-
1. Singer IB, Pondrom CN. 1969. Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview and a Biographical Sketch (Part I). Contemporary Literature 10: 1–38. [LINK]

2. Mckenna MF, Houle G. 1999. The effect of light on the growth and reproduction of Floerkea proserpinacoides. New Phytologist 141: 99–108. [LINK]