Burning the land

I believe that the practice of burning stubble is no longer allowed in England. Here in the US it is still widespread. Stubble, and wild grass. Acres and acres of it, out on the prairie.

At our local nature centre, they’ve been doing it too. Look at this picture.



Before and after. What a striking contrast. On the left is the untouched piece of land, and on the right is where they’ve burnt the old grass. You can see what it looks like a little while after the fire. I watched it, as the ground recovered from blackened nothingness to the beginnings of lush green. It changed literally day by day. It really looks quite verdant and healthy, doesn’t it? But just a very few days before, it had been like this.



I feel like the earth. There I was, minding my own business, and then cancer came, like a fire. I didn’t see it coming, I didn't ask for it, I didn’t want it. Nearly two years ago. It hurt, it destroyed, it ravaged. Pain and loss and fear. That was me, in the second picture: bare soil and blackened stems. I probably didn’t look like that to you, to others, and not even to myself. It’s not very nice to look at, when the earth is like that (click on the picture to see it full size and you'll see what I mean), so I didn’t pause to examine it much and I displayed it even less.

But the truth is that these things, these fires and cancers, if you let them, bring life. They bring growth and newness. They take out some of the dead brush. I don’t want to push the analogy too far. I rather liked myself as I was before, honestly. But I like myself, love myself, a whole lot more now. That top picture, before and after, that’s me (click on it - it's so much better full size). Somehow, in ways I see and I’m sure in ways I don’t see too, I am more full of life, more full of potential, more deeply truly myself, more fully ME, than I have ever been.

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Seasonal offerings (though getting a bit unseasonal)

OK, OK, so it’s getting a bit late now for autumnal posts, especially since it’s minus 13 degrees centigrade today, but we’ll just have a quick look at leaves, and then I’ll get into gear for Christmas. I promise.

Look at this lovely carpet of leaves in my back yard, just over a month ago. (It's worth clicking to enlarge).


You can almost hear them whispering “don’t sweep us up, don’t sweep us up” can’t you?

You will probably remember that what impresses me so much about the trees here is their ability to multi-colour (ooh, a new verb is born). Well, the leaves do it too.

These leaves have decided that those of them on one branch will be yellow, those on another will be green. How do they do that? A fine example of peaceful democracy.



Here, they’re all mixed up together.



I wonder if that creates more friction between them, or if they still happily co-exist, green and yellow, at such close quarters. Does the tree engineer the design and control when each leaf may change from green to yellow, or does each leaf have free will?

Look here, though, how within a single leaf, the multi-colour effect is achieved. These do that clever thing that the trees do, holding on to one colour in the middle while letting a new colour creep in at the edges.



This one is a work of art. Deep red veins traced against that subtle orange background, on an even deeper red stem. Perfect.



A couple of final glorious pictures, just because I can’t resist, and it’s going to be at least 9 months till autumn comes round again.






And don’t you just love this song?



To me, it captures the whole essence of the way our lives are marked by change. The seasons are a part of that. The music somehow manages to be both melancholy and cheery at the same time, which is masterly, for change is, surely, both our enemy and our friend, a stealer and a giver.

Thank you for your indulgence. I know blogging this late about autumn is very bad form. There now, I’m ready for Christmas. I’ll catch up with the rest of you.

Seasonal offerings

I knew you’d all be fed up with the festive season by now, so I thought I’d give you a break from tinsel decorations and snow scenes, and reminisce with you about autumn. What? You think I took photos of autumn leaves a month ago, didn’t get round to writing the blog post, but am still determined to use them? You cynics.

I love autumn. It’s my favourite season, always has been. And I never knew how much I was missing out. The British autumn, I’m sorry to say, is really a bit thin, compared to the richness of the season here. You know how at the beginning of October, you get a few days where it is warm again and the sky is a deep blue, and everyone says how much they are appreciating this Indian summer? Well, this year, we had that kind of weather for about eight weeks, mid September to mid November. No rain, no wind, just day after day of perfect skies and exquisite warmth. The leaves that fell stayed dry, and raking them up was like building piles of cornflakes, rather than that sludgy mess that comes with raking wet British leaves. Altogether a different experience.

Nature seemed to appreciate the perfection of the weather too, and put on some beautiful displays. Trees in Britain have to get their shows done so quickly, and in the damp. A few days, and they need to get from green foliage to bare twigs. They manage a little colour, but have to speed on through to dead brown leaves pretty fast. The trees here have the luxury of week after week of slowly fading temperatures, and still have the energy to choreograph their colour changes with finesse. What impresses me most, is the way one tree can exhibit different colours at the same time. We had two trees in our garden that were, for days on end, red at the top, yellow in the middle, and still green at the bottom. Traffic lights. I couldn’t get far enough away from them to photograph them, more’s the pity, but here are some other examples I found.

Look how this tree shades itself from orange to green, left to right.



This one decided to do it from top to bottom.



These ones do it from the inside out. See how they’re red at the ends of their branches, but still green at the core, as if holding on to summer in their hearts while bravely waving their hands at the oncoming autumn.



Impressed? Just wait till you see this. Group choreography. These five babies have got together for a chorus line performance.



Great show, gals. (That isn't a floating roof, by the way. It's just that someone painted their store the exact same shade of blue as the autumn sky.)

Some trees are just too bursting with their own creativity to bother with that shading effect, and they mix up the colours in a great effusion. This one gives us a beautiful two-tone green and yellow.



I left in that stunning little red bush for you to see. What an effort it made – the least I could do was not to crop it out of the picture.

This one couldn’t wait to decide which colours to go for, so threw them all in together and mingled them up. The photo doesn’t do it justice. Click on it to enlarge it - go on, you know you want to.



I’m glad trees are rooted to one spot. If those British trees came over in the autumn, I’d hate to witness their feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment. It would be like meeting your best friends in Milan or Paris, and walking down the most fashionable shopping streets with them in their old cords and Fair Isle sweaters. We could console the trees with talk of differences in climate, and how they do their best against the odds, but I’m sure their branches would hang low and their leaves would droop. I’d hate to see that. Of course they wouldn’t really need worry, because the trees here, being American, would be supremely impressed by the sheer size of their towering British cousins, and their history. All those years laid down in concentric circles, from the time of their sapling youth when masked highwaymen hid in their shadows, and men in tights hurtled between them in pursuit of wild boar (my historical knowledge is poetic rather than factual...). Trees here are neither large nor old. Too many ferocious winds to which they must bow low, and too many ice storms to contend with, when their branches are broken off by the weight of the days-long accumulated ice.

To finish, here is a glorious display of autumnal splendour.



Look at the rich red, the startling yellow, the mellow ochre, the luscious green. Even that little shrub in the front is shimmering in maroon and silver.


Which one? Well, it's a bit small, I admit. You probably can't appreciate it properly.



I'll enlarge it for you - I'm sure it's well worth a closer look.




Those lovely autumn tones...




Hang on...









It’s a fire hydrant. I’m getting carried away here. But don’t think I’ll be moving on to Santa and polar bears yet. Oh no. This post was trees. The next is going to be leaves. Sorry.

Nature calls

One of the things I miss most about life in Britain is the countryside, or not even the countryside, just the freedom to potter about in the outdoors. Here, the land outside the city is agricultural and inaccessible to walkers (no paths, barbed wire fences on a huge scale), and let’s face it, very flat and featureless. There are parks in the city, but they’re very small, and what you might call functional rather than beautiful.

We find we pay increasingly frequent week-end visits to the Nature Park. It’s small (a rectangle exactly a mile by half a mile), and surrounded by dual carriageways, so the chirping of the crickets has to compete with the noise of the traffic, and in winter when there aren’t leaves on the trees, you can see the large concrete building and big square orange logo of Home Depot from pretty much wherever you are in the Park. Nonetheless, green space is green space, and I am grateful for it.

The children share our excitement. When Husband and I suggest an afternoon walk in the Nature Park, they’re like little crickets themselves, jumping up and down and chorusing merrily “oh no, not AGAIN, boooring, do we have to? can I get some extra playstation time if I come?” Their enthusiasm is infectious, and we head off, beckoned by the call of the wild.

It was a really beautiful afternoon there today. Warm sun, strong breeze, clouds wandering across a blue sky, autumn colours at their finest. Autumn has always been my favourite season, but I realise now my previous experience of it has been somewhat impoverished. The trees and shrubs here put on a much better show – deep reds, earthy maroons, bright oranges, startling yellows. I don’t say this lightly. I grew up in the Chilterns, so I thought I knew a thing or two about autumn beauty. The beech woods can be stunning, majestic, exhilarating. But here, the season lasts so much longer, the variety is greater, the display more dramatic, and the weather still summery enough to allow full enjoyment of it.

This afternoon, for example, the Nature Park looked like this (you'll have to click to enlarge to do the colours justice):





















There are always turtles to be seen, paddling along lugubriously or sunning themselves on logs, and a few weeks ago I spotted a muskrat in the water. There are elegant herons, and rather overfed ducks, who swim past hunks of bread floating in the water without even a second glance (this is a Nature Park on the edge of a big city, after all, not the wilderness). Dragonflies and damselflies dart in front of us. Crickets sun themselves on the paths, so old and slow this late in the season that we have to be careful not to tread on them before they leap away. Imagine being able to get close enough to take a photo like this (um... you'll definitely need to click to enlarge that one!).


Large spiders sit in the middle of their enormous webs, and 7-yo, who has been learning about them in science, tells us about their habits, and identifies the different kinds of web.

These are hedge apples, which are such a luminous, almost neon, green that we first told the kids that they were alien brains, fallen out of the sky, (but don’t worry, we only kept that story going for a few minutes – we didn’t want nightmares disturbing their and our sleep). They are solid and large (to give you the scale, this one is pictured in four year old hands), and they make a satisfying splash when lobbed into the creek.

I love this place. For me, it offers the perfect blend of familiarity and novelty. I know my way round the color-coded trails, enough at least to navigate back to the car park by the shortest route if legs are tired, or to promise that we’ll be crossing another creek if hedge apples are being collected. The wildlife and flora still seem exotic to me, though. “Get me” I think to myself, “watching snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”, and I tuck the thought away so that in years to come I can say “In America, we used to watch snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”. Even the complaining which precedes the trip has developed a comforting feeling of family ritual about it (they complain, but we know from experience that they'll have a good time). It was thus when we lived in Scotland (“why do we ALWAYS have to go to the beach or Tentsmiur?”) and I remember it from the week-ends of my own childhood too. But I couldn’t identify a zipper spider (also known as a writing spider) in those days.

I am very cautious about posting photos on the web, and I guard my family’s anonymity carefully, but I thought this one of our shadows on the water was safe enough.











And, getting brave now, I didn’t think back views could hurt. Here are 7-yo, 11-yo and Husband.


And here is 4-yo.