Peonies raise their many tight fists toward the sky. Within a week, the blooms will burst open.
A fun guy has found a place to hang out.
A maple tree really wants to propagate, but this doesn’t look like fertile ground to me.
Nothing lasts forever. This is all that’s left of a trusty old tree that provided me a shady respite on my walk to work for the past several years.
I have no idea how many rings are there. Many – let’s leave it at that. I’m sure the tree was older than some of the surrounding houses. Goodbye old friend.
Yesterday, the day before Easter, I took a more urban walk than usual, going through downtown to a day-long event. So no flowers in this post. Usual caveats apply — this is only to share my observations and experiences. I know my photos are as amateur as it gets.
I prefer spring blankets to winter ones.
We had a long, long, long, hard, hard, hard winter here. What walks I took were utilitarian and accomplished as quickly as possible, with no taking off of gloves to snap photos.
But spring has arrived at long last. I see color popping here and there, new blossoms, life re-emerging.
We hunkered down, endured through the gray and cold. Then one day, there were flowers.
On today’s walk, it was sunny but brrr c-c-c-old. On the one-mile lap around my immediate neighborhood, I engaged in not a single spoken conversation. Yet a fair amount of communication happened.
I ignored the caution sign and went close to peek under the rock, because I’m a rebel without a clue. All I saw was a hole in the ground.
I strolled my neighborhood in unseasonably temperate weather, perfect for a walk — the last few warm hours before a predicted winter storm.
I heard leaf blowers, but never saw them. I saw people raking the brown, drying remnants of autumn, and running them over with mulching mowers. I saw a family taking photos of their toddlers playing in a leaf pile. At one house, a determined man used a front-loading Bobcat to push the masses of leaves from his lawn into one big stack near the edge.
Maybe I should have been have been doing yard work instead of playing tourist to all of the neighbors doing theirs. I still have undone weeding, left over from the summer. On the other hand, the mess of my yard might not be visible under the snow by this time tomorrow.
The bodies of the leaves are gone, but their spirits have not yet crossed over:
On Thanksgiving, a post-dinner excursion on the Katy Trail near Rocheport, Missouri.
I assume these two animals were not here at the exact same time:
Bluff on one side, river on the other. Being between a bluff and a river is a little better than between a rock and a hard place:
A little cave — a cavelet, if you will:
An old explosives depot, used by the railroad company when trains ran down this route:
Eerie shadows (my son):
Inside looking out:
Missouri River near sunset:
With the leaves largely gone, nests are exposed. There are so many. The neighborhood is more populated than I realized.
One tenacious leaf.
A red-tail hawk glided to the ground, not twenty feet from me. I’d never seen the wingspan of one from so close. It wasn’t a swooping prey snatch. The bird stopped and sat, looking intently at the ground, channeling its inner robin.
I stopped in my tracks. Nobody else nearby to startle it. But the slow draw of a phone from my coat pocket was enough to send it flying up to a tree limb. I tracked it and took a photo, but couldn’t zoom in enough to get a sharp image.
So it was memory already, the details no longer available, except what welled in me when I saw those substantial, functional, wings of power spread so near. The feeling remains vivid.
The visual details fade. Here’s what I have:
Photo and words both so inadequate to convey the experience.
Note: Posting a day late, but didn’t change the title.
Nomadic Noesis 