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Snow returned the last Saturday of April, wet and sloppy, but aside from the bent-over mayapples, the flowers hardly seemed to mind. The snow was largely melted in Lyman Woods by the next afternoon. White oak leaves were just breaking from the bud, wrapped around each other like beetles’ wings. Bur oak and red oak leaves were the size of pinky nails, the branch tips festooned with immature catkins. The white oaks were not yet in flower. Lanky, long-legged leaves of shagbark hickory strained their way out of the enormous endbuds. Poison ivy was curling off the white oak trunk like tentacles terminating in tiny, red, pubescent leaves, beautiful small things opening to the spring, lovely as flowers. Soft young hackberry leaves dripped from the branch tips. Cottonwood leaves were soft and glossy, fallen to the ground from trees all along the edge of the marsh. Gray dogwood leaves were an inch long. Missouri gooseberry had finally bloomed. Sprengel’s sedge had come into full flower along trails throughout the woods: everywhere the trees were sparse the anthers were flying, and the leaves had grown long enough to start bending in the middle, giving the plant the broken-arm look by which you can often recognize the species from across a field. Multiflora rose leaves were filling out. Buckthorn leaves were almost mature. Honeysuckle leaves were fully unfurled. Winter bittercress and small-flowered buttercup were flowering. The first floral buds were creeping out of the leaf bases on Lily-of-the-valley, the gift that keeps giving, whether you want it or not: like squill, you’re never rid of Convallaria. The leaves on annual bedstraw had grown as long as the summed lengths of the distal and middle phalanxes of my pinky. Solomon’s plume was out and easily distinguished from the true Solomon’s seal, though not yet producing floral buds. There were Jacks-in-the-pulpit spearing the leaf litter everywhere. Bloodroot fruits and leaves were swelling.

Much of the southern half of Lyman Woods was under water. I overtopped my boots getting a good look at the inner band of the leaf sheath on Carex vulpinoidea. The sheaths are corrugated, puckered crosswise, wrapped tightly around the culms or the other leaves within them. Here’s a common species I’ve seen probably at least 600 times (assuming I’ve seen it 20 to 40 times in each of the last 20 years, which seems pretty conservative). And yet I still ask myself, “any chance this is something else that I’m not thinking of?” While I worried over the plant, a Cooper’s hawk called “kek-kek-kek” from a tree above me. He flew off, and then from the overspilling marsh behind me a sora rail sang out. There are a few birds whose songs make me feel as though I were far from civilization: the sandhill crane, the woodcock, the pileated woodpecker, the sora rail. Part of the effect is association. I learned these birds in places or contexts other than where I live now, and so my rational mind, my knowing self, conditions me to feel as though I were being transported by their call. But I believe some of it is visceral, the sound itself. You don’t have to learn what Shostakovich was thinking to find his 8th string quartet haunting. You don’t have to be told how personal it is, that he encoded his name in this piece and others, to find it wrenching. The music itself does that. Your analytical mind only contributes to it.

Warblers do not have this effect on me. The weekend of foul weather may also have been a weekend of migration, for Monday a black and white warbler hit the herbarium window. It struck hard enough to get the attention of everyone in the office, but not hard enough to make it bleed. The bird landed on its back on the concrete ledge outside and laid feet up, a caricature of a dying bird. We removed the screen, reached out onto the ledge, turned it upright. The warbler rested immobile with his eyes wide open. It was cold outside, so we cut foam for the bird and slid it out onto the ledge. He did not move toward it and was alert, twitchy even. I was reluctant to pick him up and slide him onto the foam, for fear he’d writhe out of my hands and fall. Then his eyes started to shut as though he were expiring. There wasn’t much we could do, so I reached out again to pick him up and place him on the foam. As my fingers brushed his feathers, the bird jumped straight off the ledge and flew recklessly about 20 feet into the European beech whose reflection had undoubtedly lured him into the window in the first place. He disappeared. I’m hopeful that he recovered quickly. We taped hawk silhouettes to all the windows and put the foam away.

Monday and Tuesday, there was nothing but rain with nowhere to escape to. The DuPage River overtopped its banks and filled the elm collection nearly to the road. I took a walk on Tuesday that started dry and ended saturated, and still there was plenty to see. White trout lilies had started going to seed, stigmas thrust out of the fruits like adders’ tongues (which of course is not my image: that is one of their common names). The capsules of Dutchman’s breeches had started to swell. Spring beauty were fruiting, and the first flowers were coming out on Solomon’s seal. Largeflower bellwort were in bloom. Cystopteris fronds were unfurling. Things dried and warmed up near the end of the week. Friday, great-crested flycatchers were calling in the sunny morning of the East Woods. There were geranium leaves as big as my palm, some with flowers. Sugar maple leaves were drooping like handkerchiefs at the tips of spindly branches. Wild sarsaparilla was knee-high, hairy sedge was blooming, large white trilliums were coming into flower if they had a good view of the sun. If they didn’t, they were still just showing a little petal between the sepals. The first bloody thumbprints were showing on jumpseed. Woodland sunflowers were ankle-high. There was a bouquet of Christmas fern by the frog pond and a scattering of earth stars along the edge of the chipped trail.

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Saturday’s snow and the rain at the beginning of the week gave us a little extra time for reading. Robert Moor had tweeted a quote the night before the snow from a book review by Nicholas Lemann, in which Lemann writes, “The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless.” Lemann is writing about Jeremy Treglown’s Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima. It made me wonder again what distinguishes the nonfiction I have been most interested in this past few years from the fiction I was reading almost exclusively when Rachel and I first got together. Scientific writing — by which I mean scientific articles, mostly peer-reviewed stuff, reporting new findings — is not what I’m talking about. Like most academic writing, this kind of writing is about conveying information efficiently, interpreting it to explain how the world works, advancing hypotheses, pushing knowledge forward. That’s mostly what I’ve been writing since starting graduate school 20 years ago, and it seems obvious to me that structurally and in subject matter it differs from the fiction I was writing and reading as an undergraduate.

But when it comes to essays, the line is fuzzier to me. Essayists take as their subjects some portion of the world that they are uniquely poised to report about. They describe it, ruminate on it, compare something they’ve seen here with some other thing they’ve run across over there. What comes out of it is a new understanding, hopefully, arising in the reader as a consequence of the juxtaposition of images, stories from the world. I think this account of essays is fairly non-controversial. But that’s exactly how I would describe the fiction and poems I like as well. Essays and even book-length works of nonfiction operate to my eye much like poems. They are occupied with, as Billy Collins put it, comparing “everything with everything else.” You can read them for information, of course… but you can read them just as much for the change in perspective they effect in you, irrespective of whether you remember a thing from them. Dylan Thomas wrote, “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” Isn’t it the same with non-fiction? and for that matter with fiction? Fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same boat: they take as their subjects worlds that they are uniquely situated to see. They are obliged to describe them accurately. The worlds they are describing just happen to be in different places.

Why write another nature essay? I don’t think it’s to teach you something. If it were, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time writing about common knowledge, things that are familiar to me and many other people: robins, flowering buttercups, Carex woodii coming into fruit on a knoll I’ve walked past for fifteen springs, come to expect it on, always look for it and always find it, always grateful. I don’t think it’s primarily to get you outside, either. If these essays are to do anything, it’s to add something new to the world. John Burroughs saw it similarly. Look at what he writes:

Or one may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet, — wild carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial things, — behold, how beautiful!

I can’t see the difference between fiction and nonfiction as a distinction between the basic and the applied. There is very little of “now I want you to learn something from what I’m saying” in anything I write after 10 p.m. on weekdays or Sunday mornings before the boys are up. Each one of these little essays is me muttering, “Don’t forget this.” They’re phone calls to Rachel telling her she’s got to see this thing over here. They’re notes for my boys. They’re notes to myself, to pull out of the drawer when I’m 90. I don’t know precisely what they are, but I know they’re not fiction, and I know they’re also not applied. They’re just what I want to think about, and it’s happenstance that I want to keep thinking about these things I see in the woods. In a sense, the essays I read and the things I write are only accidentally nonfiction. They are about the world, and they are true. But fiction is as well. It’s just about a different world.

*

A week after our freaky late-April snow, DuPage County is warming up, and leaves have been filling out all weekend long. Saturday night, a week after the snow, I sat in the backyard by the fire. It was getting hard to read. Arcturus was just visible in the east, the only star I could see. There was a party in the neighborhood, and I leaned my head back to listen to the music. Queen was playing, and “We will Rock You” mixed with the chuckling of a robin. There was some other sound I didn’t recognize. Then I realized that the robin was not a robin at all, but a wood thrush. Could that be right? A wood thrush in our neighborhood? I listened for a few minutes, and it was unquestionable. I’d never heard one on our street, but now I wonder whether every year they come through. Is there a lineage of wood thrushes that comes and sings in our backyard every May, right as trees are filling up their leaves for summer? Was I the only one to hear it? These things happen: surprisingly ordinary things that are surprising in one way go unnoticed by everyone but you sometimes, which makes you wonder how often they go unnoticed by everyone in the world.

Take this as you like. If you want it as information, you can have it. A wood thrush on Otis Avenue is certainly news to me. A late-season snow, the order of flowering week by week, what day the black-and-white warbler hit her herbarium window: it’s all information. And at the same time, that won’t be why I care about it when I’m 96, and knowing about it isn’t enough for me. This is non-fiction, but it’s not applied. It’s the first week of May. That’s the main point I’m trying to make here.

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Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Aralia nudicaulis – wild sarsaparilla
• Arisaema triflorum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Barbarea vulgaris – winter bittercress
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex vulpinoidea – fox sedge
• Carya ovata – shagbark hickory
• Celtis occidentalis – hackberry
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Convallaria majalis – lily-of-the-valley
• Cornus racemosa – gray dogwood
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Helianthus occidentalis – woodland sunflower
• Lonicera x bella – honeysuckle
• Maianthemum racemosum – Solomon’s plume
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Polygonum virginianum – jumpseed
• Polystichum acrostichoides – Christmas fern
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Quercus alba – white oak
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus abortivus – small-flowered buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri goodeberry
• Rosa multiflora – multiflora rose
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy

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¹ Richard Powers, “What Does Fiction Know?” Places Journal, August 2011. Accessed 05 May 2019. https://doi.org/10.22269/110802

Wildflowers flooded the woods over Easter weekend, like water spilled over the edges of the creek, running in sheets across the fallen oak leaves and overtopping the foliage that has carpeted the woods the past two weeks. The spring beauty in the woods caught up with its cousins under the planted oaks, where the mulched beds are still pooling with white and pink. The yellow trout lilies in the north half of the East Woods are deep yellow, deeper than the yellow of marshmallow Peeps or egg yolks, tulips or Forsythias. Bristly buttercup is flowering in seeps, and large-flowered bellwort, wood anemone, rue-anemone and false rue-anemone are blooming in the uplands. Downy yellow violets and wood violets flower beside each other under the oaks. Marsh marigold fills the springy seeps. Virginia bluebell flowers have gone from closed at the beginning of the week to perhaps a quarter of them open on Thursday.

This is the week for woodland wildflowers. There are still far more leaves than flowers, however. For every square foot of white trout lily flowers, there are perhaps 4 more of unflowering trout lily lawn. For every toothwort bloom there is a garden of groundcover. Bloodroot flowers have already gone to pieces while the leaves continue to expand, sopping up sunlight to provision the swelling capsules. Wild leeks are unabashedly soaking it up. Wild garlic and broad-leaved bedstraw haven’t so much as thought of flowering. Duckweed is spreading across ponds. It is perhaps a sedge taxonomist’s conceit, but I cannot help thinking of the flowers as an incidental part of life in the woods. I know better, of course: without flowers we don’t have sex and recombination, and there are all sorts of reasons to want those. But when I look at the woods, even in this week of flowers, I see autotrophs, photosynthesizing behind their finery.

On my walk out on Monday evening, about 5:00 p.m., I followed my typical shortcut, out the back side of the research building, up the path through the conifers, then northeast around the Pinus densiflora toward the Children’s garden and the four pillars at the top of the hill. I typically think of this lawny no-man’s land as a place to hustle through and scan for flowering weeds, use the steps to check my camera, get my head calibrated for a few minutes of looking once I get back into the woods, where I’ll gather up observations on the way back to my bike. Rounding the Pinus densiflora, I entered a sort of room of spruces to the west, the Children’s garden 100 feet to the north, a Pinus cembra to the south. The Picea koyamae was tall enough to crack its crown over the fence if it fell toward the garden. The noise of I-88 died down with the pine between us, and I saw a butterfly moving around. I thought at first it was a mourning cloak, but there was too much color. Painted lady? No… red admiral? Probably, but there wasn’t much time for wondering about that, because I realized after focusing on the one that in fact I was in a clearing with many, all apparently involved in some kind of chase, flying around each other into the air.

I’ve seen individual butterflies doing this, meeting each other in midair and then flying up and around one another, spiraling higher and higher before they split off or a third comes in. But at this moment it seemed to be all around me. At first I felt I’d walked into utter chaos, a riot of butterflies, but within a minute or two what I was seeing sorted out a bit, and it seemed perhaps just two or three red admirals were taking turns patrolling this little spot. Or maybe each was patrolling a subarea within a larger room closed in by trees and shrubs. The others appeared to be interlopers or playing tag-team, so there were always just a couple or a few in charge of the opening. The core butterflies at any given moment would rest periodically on a patch of matted dead grasses in the otherwise greening lawn, only for a second at most, then fly into the air to greet an incoming butterfly. They would circle upward in a helix, and often a third would come in and that one and one of the first two would go barreling off toward the south, up near the treetops, almost as fast as a hummingbird patrolling between flowers–is that possible?–while the remaining butterfly settled down to rest for his allotted 1/2-second.

They were ceaseless, and I could not get a decent photo. I crouched for several minutes by the dead grass where they would perch, waiting with camera in hand, but I landed only one photo, a horrible one, enough however to identify the butterflies positively as red admirals. After 15 minutes or so, I had to go. I wasn’t able to get back to thinking about this until the next day, but with a little reading I found that Vanessa atalanta L., the red admiral, is notoriously territorial. In a 1979 article in the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, Royce Bitzer and Kenneth Shaw describe observations made on the Iowa State University campus, where they identified five red admiral territories. Their observations were uncannily like what I observed: males occupied territories, generally ellipses of 12-24 m long, with a few resting spots on bare ground or sidewalk, invariably lighter than the surrounding grass. Intruders (or, perhaps for the scientists’ amusement, dry floating leaves) were intercepted by the resident males, who charged from beneath and forced the potential invaders upward in a spiral to the level of the surrounding treetops, boosted them over the rim of their shrub- or tree-enclosed room, and went back to patrolling. They did not feed, oviposit, mate, or roost within their defended territories. They were fast and intent.

That night I sat on the bedside with my son and listened with him to the story of Icarus and Daedalus, which was playing on the CD player beside his bed. As Icarus fell into the water, I recalled W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”. The poem centers around a visit he describes in a letter to a friend thus: “I have been doing the art gallery and trying to appreciate Rubens. The daring and vitality take one’s breath away, but what is it all ABOUT?” His poem begins with lines that follow you around on your afternoon walks:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…

and then closes with a scene from Breughel’s depiction of the death of Icarus, in which the entire painting is filled with doing and life and activity, and far off in the background we see the smallest and most insignificant of splashes. He tells us:

… the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Daedalus circles over the water watching for his son while late April blooms bob above the foliage. Blue-gray gnatcatchers bizz and wheeze along the tree branches. Flies buzz through the yard. Bumblebees patrol low over the tops of the plants. Bur oak leaves have emerged from the bud but are hugging each other tightly, backs ridged, tummies hidden, the size of voles’ tongues. In only a few days, false mermaid has bolted and flowered, upright carrion flower has formed fists of floral buds, prairie trillium has started blooming in a few places, the petals of great white trillium have peeked out from between the bud scales. Blue cohosh is about to flower. Wood’s sedge and Sprengel’s sedge and Pennsylvania sedge are in full flower.

Wednesday afternoon at around 2 p.m., I returned to the place where the red admirals had been sparring. There were painted ladies flitting around, but none interacting, and no red admirals. I know from years past that there will still be flowers in the woods next week. But I have no idea about the red admirals. I don’t know if they’ll be fighting next week or if they’re done for the year. I’ll check on my walk out on Friday.

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Plants referenced:

• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Caltha palustris – marsh marigold
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Enemion biternatum – false rue-anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Erythronium americanum – yellow trout lily
• Galium circaezens – broad-leaved bedstraw
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Smilax ecirrhata – upright carrion flower
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue-anemone
• Trillium grandiflorum – great white trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort
• Viola pubescens – yellow violet
• Viola sororia – wood violet

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Image from: Bitzer RJ, Shaw KC. 1979(80). Territorial behavior of the red admiral, Vanessa atalanta (L.) (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae). The Journal of research on the Lepidoptera. 18: 36–49. Shared by the Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Sunday one week ago we had five inches of snow. I’m not a weather watcher, and it caught me by surprise, right in the middle of April. By Monday morning the snow had started to melt, but it was still several inches thick in the East Woods. The mayapples stood in bunches, like passengers waiting for the bus in a blizzard, coats wrapped tightly under their chins, stiff, silent. The white fawn lilies were half-buried, but their leaf tips were spiky atop the surface of the snow. False mermaid clustered under fallen logs and at the bases of the trees, where the snow had melted down a bit or not accumulated in the first place. Only the spring beauty gave the impression of having been beaten down by the snow; perhaps not set back, but disappointed, slowed a bit. Spring beauty is lovely, but it is not strong.

Monday afternoon, much of the snow had melted. Rachel saw mourning cloak butterflies in the garden. By Tuesday morning, the snow had almost all melted away. At sunrise the field sparrows and robins and song sparrows were all going strong, and by an hour later I was hearing towhees. On the north-facing slope overlooking the frog pond, patches of snow about the size of a boot print were nestled at base of every third tree, downslope, protected from the sun. There were no frogs calling, but a ruby crowned kinglet insistently sang and sang from down near the pond, where a pair of wood ducks were coming in for a landing. Botanizing, eyes on the ground, I stumbled upon a Cooper’s hawk that had caught a flicker. As raptors will do, the bird sized me up before flying off with its quarry, low through the trees, leaving a cloud of feathers in the middle of the chipped trail. When Rachel and I met for lunch that day, we saw bumblebees and painted ladies.

The burned woods have turned green with lawns of trout lily and Virginia waterleaf, whose leaves have expanded rapidly in the past few days. Everything has gone nuts with the melting snow and warm temperatures. The blue-green tips of Carex hirtifolia and the burgundy-based Carex woodii shoots are nearly three inches tall. Pennsylvania sedge has started to flower, only the stigmas visible, whitish filaments emerging from the dark scales at the bases of the inflorescences, sinuous, arching inward near the tips. Inflorescence spikes are up on the Sprengel’s sedge, but still closed. Carex sparganioides shoots are almost as big around as lead pencils. Jacob’s ladder forms bunches in the drier, more open areas of the woods. Some Asteraceae (zigzag goldenrod?) is coming up here and there at the north edge of the spruce plot. Hepatica is still flowering, and the spring foliage has started opening. Common wood violet leaves started unrolling along the edges of the trails and at the bases of trees at the beginning of the week, and by Friday morning they were in bloom. American elm has come into fruit. Early meadow-rue leaves are stacked like hands of playing cards, the margins purple, the floral buds packed as densely as the flowers on grape hyacinth. Blue cohosh stems arch like dancers. Foliage of wood anemone is about 3 inches high and glossy; foliage of bristly buttercup is sprawling. Dutchman’s breeches opened for business this week. The sea of Virginia bluebells at the far east end of the East Woods before the power lines is about to bloom. Ridged backs of the ironwood leaves have gone from just pushing out of the buds to being out, still folded, a little larger than a grain of orzo. Buckthorn leaves have grown to the size of mouse’s ears.

Thursday morning the American toads started singing in the slough behind the local elementary school. In our warm spring of 2017, toads were singing in this same slough on April 15, so perhaps this year is on track from the toad standpoint, even if the wildflowers are lagging. In the East Woods, ironwood catkins were descending. Sugar maple leaves were expanding in the understory (not yet on the grown trees) and the beltlike cotyledons were snapping out of the seeds. Wild ginger leaves were fully out of the soil and spreading, quarter-sized cotyledons were spread wide on seedlings of great waterleaf. Toothwort flowers were opening—they seem to me to be particularly slow this year, but maybe it is my imagination—and whorls of leaves on the annual cleavers were as big around as a fifty-cent piece. There were slugs climbing the false mermaid and earthworms writhing on the sidewalks. In the wetlands beneath the power lines at the east end of the Arboretum, chorus frogs and peepers and American toads were singing together while a belted kingfisher crackled overhead.

Friday I came in to find the ravine sloping down into the woods just beyond the east edge of the oak and maple collections awash with green. Along its shoulders grew an enormous colony of Dutchman’s breeches in full bloom. I found fourteen species in the understory on the east-facing slope of the ravine: a matrix of false mermaid with wild garlic up to the middle of my shins, wild leeks fully expanded, toothwort in early flower, Carex rosea not yet flowering, wild geranium, dogtooth lilies coming into flower, wood anemone, bristly buttercup near the base of the slope, prairie trillium, mayapples unfurling, big-flowered trillium about to flower, spring beauty. And of course the Dutchman’s breeches. Elsewhere in the woods was foliage of sweet cicely and herb Robert, boot-high Canada bluegrass, shoots of Solomon’s seal eight inches tall, leaves just starting to spread open. Peachfuzz was evident on the rosettes of Carex hirtifolia from several feet away. A patch of fleshy scurfy twiglet was sprouting from the wood chips.

On my walk out on Friday I saw several mourning cloaks moving around among the ruby-crowned kinglets fly-catching in the shin-high wild hyacinth foliage and the brown creepers on the tree trunks (I think I saw one last week as well but didn’t get a good look… how long have they been in town?). Bur oak and Hill’s oak end buds were swelling. Floral buds had started forming on the wood anemone. Trout lilies were flowering along the edges of the trail. Marsh marigold was in bloom. The spring beauty was in full bloom under a Quercus x jackiana in the oak collection.

There are a couple of weeks like this each year when I find it almost impossible to keep up. I walk and take pictures, write in my notebook, try to get every name in there, to not forget the state of the leaves and buds and flowers, and I feel I’m just storing stuff up. I recalled as I walked in on Friday a passage from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in which Zooey is worrying over his sister, but to his sister, kind of berating her over the phone: “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure… and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.” And what am I doing? Laying up treasure. The way I walk through the woods scribbling down names and conditions of individual plants is essentially piling up dimes and quarters.

And yet it makes me so happy, all this counting and recording and writing it down, like when I was 24 and just realizing that this was what liked to do: catch some little thing about the natural world that I hadn’t noticed and describe it. This is the season for stockpiling observations, laying aside notes and recollections for later in the summer when I can think about it more clearly, or for when I’m 98 and don’t get around so well. This was an exceptionally good week to be doing it.

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Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Caltha palustris – marsh marigold
• Camassia scilloides – wild hyacinth
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex hirtifolia – a hairy-leaved sedge, the hairiest thing in the woods right now
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge… maybe. It’s what you may have learned as Carex convoluta, whereas what you may have learned as Carex rosea is now Carex radiata. Confusing! Give a holler and I explain it to you. It’s a good story
• Carex sparganioides – bur-reed sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge, but he doesn’t own it. You do, if you know it (think of Allen Ginsburg: “Who digs Los Angeles is Los Angeles”… so it is with sedges)
• Carex woodii – sometimes called lovely sedge, which isn’t fair, because they are all lovely
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Erythronium albidum – fawn lily, dog-tooth violet, trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – cleavers, annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Geranium robertianum – herb Robert
• Hepatica acutiloba – Hepatica
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Hydrophyllum virginianum – Virginia waterleaf
• Lemna minor – duckweed
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Poa compressa – Canada bluegrass
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Solidago flexicaulis – zigzag goldenrod
• Thalictrum dioicum – early meadow-rue
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Ulmus americana – American elm
• Viola sororia – common wood violet

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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