Slime molds, June weekends

Coral slime molds caught me by surprise Saturday morning, spreading like hoarfrost on the sides of downed ashes. With them, equally unexpected, were a scattering of wolfs milk: delicate, rubbery orange spheres that bleed fluorescent goo when you squeeze them. These two slime molds popped out a couple of weeks earlier than I expected. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for Cribraria and Arcyria as well, their comrades-in-arms. Narrow leaved wild leeks were on the cusp of flowering, edges of the white petals showing from behind the separating green petals like the hem of a slip. I let Brooklyn run down hill into St. Joseph Creek. She splashed around and looked back up at my friend and his dog and me. Then she ran back up the hill to us. She stood patiently as I picked her leash back up then shook river water on us. My friend was impressed that Brooklyn would just come back like that when there’s such a nice river to play in, then stand still to be taken again by the leash. What could I do but agree? Brooklyn is that kind of dog.

It’s the onset of the green lull, and little has changed at Maple Grove in the last week. Also, I haven’t written up my notes from last weekend. So, from a sunny 7:45 on Sunday morning, June 7, in order:

• Northern parula warbler and a blue-gray gnatcatcher at the margin of the woods as I walk in. Behind us, a yellow warbler in the neighbor’s shrubs. Chimney swifts overhead.
• Great-crested flycatcher. Red-bellied woodpecker. A blue jay. Robins and an eastern wood pewee.
• Path rushes immature, slender and prickly.
• Recurved buttercup fruits ripe and ready to fall, breaking easily from the receptacle.
• Carex rosea fruits ripe as well, the plant slenderer than I would have expected, but undoubtedly this species, stigmas thick and black and tightly coiled at the tips of the perigynium beaks. The Carex davisii fruits I somehow missed on the way in: they’re nowhere to be seen, like the serviceberries at the church lot down the street that I’ve pilfering (faithfully) for 17 years. Carex cephalophora heads yellowing.
• Oak catkins strewn across the poison ivy and virginia creeper.
• Fowl mannagrass inflorescences shattering, raining spikelets onto the trail.
• Mosquitos in my ear.
• Jays and red-eyed vireos singing. Great-crested flycatcher blasting. Cardinal whooping. Eastern wood pewee whistling. The 8:00 a.m. churchbell.
• Beams of sunlight slanting diagonally through the trees, casting patches of light on the forest floor. Cranefly moving through.
• Senescing Enemion, flecks of pale yellow.
• Mayapple fruits gone on a few plants I pass, before they could reach maturity.
• A big, burly bee–carpenter bee? bumblebee?–patrolling over the leaf litter, alighting, moving off.
• An abandoned tennis ball; Brooklyn doesn’t even care.
• Two narrow-leaved wild leek scapes standing right next to each other, practically holding hands at the base of a sugar maple, inflorescences still hooded, the flowers practically wriggling inside, the long-tipped spathe about to split open.
• A red eyed vireo.
• Zigzag goldenrod knee-high. Beggars’ ticks thigh- to waist-high.
• Another patch of mayapple, about half the fruits gone.
• Sprawling yellowed bluegrass.
• Wreckage of Virginia bluebells that has died back for the season.
• A colony of broad-leaved white bear sedge where I saw a thicket of seedlings almost exactly a year ago.  

The last two nights I’ve walked up and through Lyman Woods a bit after sunset. Poke milkweed plants are colluding at the top of a hill, in indulgent flower. This is the second time this year I’m struck by how many there are here. A deer surprised me on my walk through, standing so close to the trail I could have run over and tagged it. This is of course not true: I could no more have tagged that deer than Brooklyn could capture any of the hundreds of squirrels or bunnies she runs after in our yard. Neither of us is handy in that way.

Saturday night I was talking with Rachel on the phone as the lights went out in the forest. We don’t usually talk on the phone while we’re in the woods, but it was nice to hear her voice as the fireflies were going off all around. It was dark where she was, and it was dark where I was, and her voice was right in my ear, which made it seem like we were standing in the same darkness together. We finished our conversation. I stood and watched the lightning bugs glowing intermittently in the sunflowers. The edges of the leaves faded into one another. The forest grew darker, the lightning bugs brighter. I could barely see my feet as I walked out.

On the way home, a minor miracle: as I approached the frozen custard place, bemoaning the fact that I had forgotten my wallet, but applauding myself that I would saving money and also not eating unnecessary frozen custard, I found a forgotten five dollar bill in my pocket. I got a small chocolate cone, which comes with two scoops. It was a little crooked, a little tippy, but it was good and cold.