An Unremarkable Patch of Woods

Come for a walk.

This past week was full of lovely September days, the kind you wish you could bottle up for later use.

Yes, one frozen January morning or drizzly March afternoon, I think I'll go to my cupboard and crack the lid off a golden September when it was cool in the shade, warm in the sun: just right for reading picture books in the hammock or hanging clothes on the line while the baby crawls in the leaves and the girls find mushrooms and orb webs.

I picked that mushroom to give my daughter. She has been studying fungi this week. She was convinced it was a puffball, even though I assured her it was just the button stage of some other variety. Undeterred, she stomped on it. Instead of a satisfying puff of ashen spores, it just broke in half, revealing a black, truffley inside.

One afternoon, I walked the trails across the street. The shortest full loop takes a little more than an hour, but the trails fork off a few times, some leading into town. These are private trails made available for public use, maintained by locals who use them for four-wheeling, and a few of the signs remind us to treat the trails well.

Considering how much the trailhead was changed by the new Tractor Supply and Little League fields, I was relieved to see how unchanged the trails themselves felt, right down to the enormous puddle-turned-frog-pond that obstructs a good twenty feet of path.

At first, when I'm in the woods, I try to make profound observations on what I see, like how nature appears most brilliant before it dies off for the year, or how you need decay to grow new life. Then I laugh at myself for trying to be deep and give myself over to enjoying the woods. Maybe a truly profound thought will float to the surface later, but that's not why I go into the woods.

All of those shades of green. I love the ferns and the light. These are pretty young woods, considering, and rusty farm equipment here and there gives echoes of the crops and pastures that were once here. There's even an old barn foundation atop one hill, not far from a marshy spring. It makes me want to explore more, even while I worry about stumbling upon some half-covered well. Anyone remember those dark musings in Jayber Crow, when Jayber imagines some city-slicker hunter falling through a rotted well-cover? It's enough to teach caution.

A half-dead apple tree grows in the old barn cellar. It still grows some good-sized apples, and the windfalls smell sweet. A descendant of some dead orchard, it has presumably never been pruned, but it's not totally wild, either, to produce fruit like that. That's a thought to mull over, maybe.