Aaaahhhh.   gnu.



Whether the perspective of the vista is from down in the holler or up on the ridge, the mists rising or settling anywhere in the central and southern Appalachians, land that I love.

The woods in mid-afternoon in late winter, when the play of light and shadow is exquisite, and the quality of light causes the tree trunks, lichens, mosses, rocks and leaf litter to glow.

A full moon setting over the Gulf of Mexico in the wee hours as we paddled out to the Content Keys, stuck on mudflats for several hours at low tide in the back country of Florida Bay in winter. (I've never been to the Keys in summer, and don't know how the quality of light might be different.)

My only trip up the Big Sur and a bit north of there to the Muir Woods and Point Reyes National Seashore was very exotic and has left an indelible visual impression even 20+ years later. I especially remember the cliffs and whirling seas, as well as the sea otters at Point Lobos, the cathedral-like impact of the filtered light and shadows of the Muir Woods, and the beautiful colors and effects of water, wind, wave and rock at Point Reyes, so very different from the southern Atlantic coast. Same trip and different, but equally remembered was the long drive back to Los Angeles down the Central Valley with mile after mile of undulating hills covered in brown and tan grasses and windmills.

The big field that abuts my mother's house any time of year, but especially in late summer and early fall, with it's large and somewhat cacophonous sweep of goldenrod, New York Iron-weed, staghorn sumac, coreopsis, pokeweed with lots of purple berries, the occasioan Queen Anne's Lace blooming late because it was browsed earlier by white-tailed deer, accented here and there by the green of Eastern Red Cedar seedlings, and the whole polyglot of native and alien species of trees seedlings, annuals and perennials involved with the evolutionary progression of flora and fauna in that part of the world are present. Pretty awesome.

That field has an interesting history just in my lifetime. This is not the thread or the time to tell it, but it is the mundane nuts and bolts of which the stuff of folklore, and therefore the history of communities can be traced, so maybe sometime I will do so.

The stark and crisply detailed shadow cast courtesy of a streetlight by a small potted ivy hanging on the porch onto the white clapboard siding of my former millhouse bungalow in a small southern village in the USA.