On the Beach - Part 1

After church today, I went for a walk on the beach because I wanted to stay in town for a folk music concert in the afternoon (which was really fun, but not the point of this post).



I went with the idea to try to find some pictures that are a little different from the usual beach scenes. Not that they are bad, but those of us who live near Lake Michigan get overdosed with sun and sand and waves.



I came home with way too many pictures! But I narrowed it down to 10 that seemed interesting. I'll show you half today and half tomorrow. I really like things that look like something else (as you may have figured out!). This sandy "cliff" is only about two feet high. But it reminds me of desert dwellings or a setting for a fantasy game, or... you tell me...



This is the very edge of a wave as the last of its energy is being dissipated. Just a few bubbles left. Have you noticed that you can click to make the pictures larger? I'm finally getting my photo pages set up pretty much the way I want them. Most of these pictures look better when they are bigger.



It was hard to believe that it is November. I went looking for a solitary experience, but there were several groups of people enjoying the "warm" weather. It was great, but after 30 minutes I was pretty frozen.



One lone leaf just out of reach of the last wave...

I ate my sandwich and apple, and retreated to the car and half a mug of still-warm coffee. Then I headed for the library to wait for the concert to start. Ended up checking out the complete works of e. e. cummings. I can't remember the name, or a full line, of a poem that I'm sure he wrote, so I'm searching by brute force.

Five more tomorrow!

See Rediscovering Jenks Creek See The White Cliffs of...

Rediscovering Jenks Creek

 



Today was our trail club's regular monthly hike. We just managed to sneak it in before gun deer season which starts tomorrow. Most hikers choose to leave the woods to the hunters for those weeks. Too many accidents happen.

But after the group broke up, I chose to hike an extra two miles. This is a section of trail that I've hiked at least 3 other times. But I had completely forgotten how it follows the lovely little Jenks Creek here. Most people don't even know it's there at all. See the road crossing? Just a guardrail. Modern road building certainly makes it easy for travelers to be completely unaware of landscape features, especially small ones like creeks.



Following the trail, there are places where you can get a clear view of the creek. It may be more noticeable in the woods this fall because we had such a wet October and has flowing water. Here it looks like a definite stream bed, but in many places it is braided and becomes swampy in its small floodplain.



This is a very typical look at the creek bed. There was actually quite a bit of motion to the water. I always like how the tape grass seems to flow like green water in the current. The streams in these woods look so brown because of all the tannins from the oak leaves.



You know that I just find textures and patterns fascinating. So the final three pictures are just sunlight on the water at various places along the stream.



Any little trickle of water can become a wonderful palette for the impressionistic brush of sun and shadow.



I hope you enjoyed the little journey along Jenks Creek with me. This afternoon, thanks to the clearing reported yesterday, I mowed all my trails in back of my house, getting them ready for snow. The skiing is much better when I get the weeds and berry canes cleared. It was hard to think about snow under the blue skies today, but it IS mid-November!

	See My World is Blue See More Textures

One Job Done...

This is a big file. It was a big job. Nothing too exciting. I just want to celebrate its completion! I actually started Oct 28, and have been doing one wheelbarrow of wood almost every nice day.



Stay tuned, now that I have a nice woodpile of hardwood I think I smell grilled hamburgers in my near future!

P.S. What's up (down) with my Alexa rank? It keeps dropping. Big frowny face. I know it's a 3-month average, but we should be getting past the time I was gone by now...

See Monthly Winners for when this job began

Why I Don't Walk in the Woods in a Stiff Wind

I guess this is in the nature of a safety tip. But I'm not trying to tell you anything that I don't remind myself about often, too. Every once in a while you hear an oddball story where a tree fell on a camper's tent in the wind and injured or killed them. So... it's always good, when setting a tent up, to check for nearby dead trees. But that danger is pretty rare. This one is a bit amazing to me.

The picture above is pretty much an ordinary photo of the cemetery. But you might notice what looks like a small dead sapling to the left of the large tree. It's not a sapling. It's a branch, only about an inch in diameter, that blew down and stuck itself in the ground.



Here's the hole when I pulled the stick out. I left a foot in the picture for scale.



Here's the eye opening part. This was only a kindling sized stick, right? But it was buried in the ground... nice compacted ground... 2.5 to 3 inches. Think about the force required to do that. Think about the comparative resistance of skin and muscle compared to hard ground... Think twice about walking through mature forests in a high wind, ok?

See Hanging the Cache See Cold Gold

A Veteran's Day Story

 
Today is Veteran's Day, first called Armistice Day to remember the end of World War I. I certainly mean no disrespect for veterans, but mostly I am thinking about my mom, born Catherine Burnham Rowe, today. If she were alive, she would be 100 years old!



Of course, it wasn't a holiday when she was born. She always told me that her memory of that date 11/11/1918, when she turned 9 years old, was that she couldn't understand why everyone was all excited about something she didn't truly appreciate, and no one was paying any attention to her! The picture above is undated, and she never told me exactly when it was taken, but it looks to me as if she would have been about 9 or 10 at the time.

She graduated from Temple University with a degree in Home Economics, and followed a "track" more typical of many women today rather than in the 1930s. She taught in a school for the deaf, supervised relief work after floods in Pennsylvania, and ended up back in New York state in the early 1940s. There she met my dad, and well... here she is with "guess who" in 1948. It was really rare for women to become mothers at the age of 39 back then.

My relationship with my mother was always rocky. I was much more like my dad. But it is undeniable that she really went out of her way to try to do her best by me. She was the mom who would be the Scoutmaster, or take a group of us kids to camp, etc., when the mothers half her age were nowhere to be found. She fought the school system (but ultimately lost) trying to create better educational opportunities for me, and always made sure that I had books, art supplies, and opportunities to visit museums. She took me to the woods as a toddler, and then, of course, no one could get me OUT of the woods!

Here she is making the acquaintance of our youngest son. All our boys were adopted, and he had been in our family for about 2 months when we traveled to NY to let him meet the grandparents. She was very happy about that, and Steve seems pretty happy here too.

Finally, here is Mom on her 80th birthday. It wasn't the last one she enjoyed as an independent adult, but she only had a few more before needing full-time care. She had Parkinson's, and then broke her hip... she never returned home after that.

So, I'll just wish mom a happy century, even though she's not here in person to enjoy a birthday cake.

See The Point of My Quality Day for one of the other sons, grown up. I haven't blogged about the one in this baby picture yet.