3 p.m., 20F, cloudy, light snow falling
The footpath off the main trail is stamped with the footprints of perhaps a dozen walkers since last night’s snow. Along the trailside are frozen walnuts with husks desiccated and brown, pock-marked in a state of semidecay, chewing marks here and there. They look like the brown-wrapped mummies of an Egyptian museum exhibit.
Two birds are calling at about 40 feet up in the trees around me, but I cannot recognize the sound. I stop, watch for them, find one moving on a leaning white oak. It is a red-headed woodpecker, puffed up in the cold, picking methodically at a bend in the tree where, perhaps, a branch broke off and there is a notch where beetle larvae are overwintering, or caterpillars. It works its way in from both sides, turning its head and striking a few times, pulling back to look around, moving its bill as though swallowing, strikes again. Its bill looks as slender as surgical forceps from where I stand, though the photos I find online later make it look nowhere near as fine an instrument. It flies off and I lose it. A red-bellied woodpecker barks and a white-breasted nut hatch calls.
The snow throws everything into contrast. Between the forest and the marsh I run across a knot of catalpas I had forgotten about. One is two trunked, low, and gnarled, a kindergartner’s dream of a witch’s tree. It dangles slender capsules over the trail, each nearly as long as my forearm, a Christmas tree festooned in pencil-thin, tibia-length beans. A posse of robins flies by, alternately flapping and gliding as they ride the shoulder past me on the trail, chatting and chuckling their way to a dead tree overlooking the marsh. Two of them swoop upward to recline in the tree, one taking the very topmost branch tip, the other the tip of a branch below. They are uncouth, but they are probably good-hearted. They are a bit cavalier. The others glide down into the brush below.
Two red berries the size of mung beans hang on a bare honeysuckle. They are not quite frozen hard, the sugars inside keeping their pulp slushy. Two-footed robin tracks follow the trail to meet the tracks of a rabbit and squirrel at the foot of a bench, all winding around looking for food of some kind that I cannot see. I walk out onto the boardwalk floating at the edge of the marsh, and it cracks through the ice and sinks by an inch. Two geese honk as they fly over the open marsh.
A husked, eviscerated black walnut is lodged in the burl of a black cherry that is leaning over the forest trail. The cherry’s roots are exposed about halfway. They form a bump at the base beside a small hollow where they have pulled out of the ground, making a hiding spot where mice might rest for a moment on an owlish late afternoon. A particularly unkempt shagbark hickory has assembled a collection of fallen leaves. The leaves are tucked into the long-curved upper tips of its bark plates like lists of New Year’s resolutions tucked into a notebook.
I appear to be only the second to have walked this slender section of trail at the far south edge of the forest preserve since the snowfall. I go out past a new-fallen tree; over the drainage from the neighborhoods into Lacey Creek, running high but not turbid, just below the bases of the Iris leaves coming up; then back to the main trail, where footprints in the slush and snow and mud have coalesced into icy ridges.
