Summer, fall, winter. We’ve spent one of each here in the Appalachian mountains of Blacksburg, Virginia. And finally, we get to see spring. We took a walk at the Falls Ridge Preserve on Sunday, a 655 acre plot of land owned and maintained by The Nature Conservancy. It’s only about 15 minutes from our home, with an easy half mile trail packed with a lime kiln, shallow caverns that provided at least an hour of entertainment for our kids, a stream, a waterfall, and of course, wildflowers.
White Anemone Appalachian wildflower at Falls Ridge Nature Preserve
Yellow spicebush flower buds at Falls Ridge
Lime Kiln at Falls Ridge Nature Preserve
Pink anemone flower at Falls Ridge in Appalachia
Buds on a bush in Falls Ridge Nature Conservancy Preserve
Spring fed waterfall at Falls Ridge Nature Conservancy Preserve Blacksburg, VA Appalachia
Funky green Applachian bud (or flower?) at Falls Ridge Nature Preserve
Redbud tree buds at Falls Ridge Nature Preserve
White Trillium wildflower at Falls Ridge Nature Preserve
Buds on a bush in Falls Ridge Nature Preserve in Blacksburg, VA
Spring fed stream at Falls Ridge Preserve Blacksburg, Virginia
I know it is totally cliché to post photographs of spring for an April “Change” photo challenge. While this photo essay does embrace all the conventional themes of spring transition – new life, hope, color, potential – the type of change these photographs signify to me is one of having roots, being established, and consequently, being able to bloom. For the first time in our married life, my husband and I aim to stop wandering. This is unprecedented for us, to stay put in one place, possibly for the rest of our lives. It seems significant somehow, to wrap up our first year with the season of spring, the season of new life, hope, color, and potential. To put down roots while we watch our new world blossom.
Directions to Falls Ridge Preserve from Blacksburg: From South Main Street, just north of 460, turn onto Ellet Rd. (which becomes Cedar Run Rd.). Follow Cedar Run Rd. to the end and turn left on Jennelle Rd. at the railroad tracks. Follow Jennelle to the Food Time store (you’ll pass another Ellet Rd) and turn right on Den Hill Rd. Turn left on North Fork Rd and drive about three miles. On your right you will see a super rickety bridge on your right, with red railings and a sign that says “Use at your own risk.” Turn right and cross that bridge. Cross the railroad tracks and make an immediate left on a dirt/gravel road. Follow about .25 miles and you will see a parking lot on the left. There is a Nature Conservancy Kiosk in the grassy meadow. Follow the meadow to the woods and you will see the caves, kiln, and waterfall.
“…The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature)…” – Alice Walker
I’ve been reading Southern women – I turned the final page of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter last night, and tore through Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood before that. As I read those, I waited impatiently for either Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to become available at our public library. And wouldn’t you know it, they both became available yesterday. What a quandary. Which should I read first?! After careful deliberation, which included a plea for guidance on my Facebook page and an appetite for getting back to my roots, I chose Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where I planted my first carrot seeds, shucked my first corn, and caught my first yellow belly in the Crooked Creek that ran through Grandaddy and Nannie’s farm. I began reading last night, and I’m already a goner.
I loved Alice Walker’s suggestion that the color purple is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature, so I took my camera out for this week’s photo challenge, Color, to see if it was true. Given that the world is still mostly brown here in Blacksburg – the weeping willows are the only trees leafing out yet, and there are only a few blooms here and there – I was surprised by how much purple there actually was. Can’t wait to see how the color purple plays into the novel.
I had a great post, all ready to go, about how we organize the books on our shelves (exciting, I know), when I saw the Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life. I had a typical day planned – cooking, groceries, cleaning, cooking – with the addition of currently atypical good weather and the kids being home for spring break. Here’s how we spent our day.
6:00 am First things first. Coffee.
6:05 am My writing station, complete with green mug
7:05 amMaking lunches for husband.
8:00 am Bodyweight work out
9:00 am Breakfast: Boiled egg with salt, Greek yogurt with honey, cofee with cream and sugar, paper
9:30 am Washing breakfast dishes
10:00 am Prepping dinner for the crockpot
10:00 am Onion saute with taco seasoning
10:30 am Kids coloring addition color by numbers. Their choice
11:00 am Visiting dad at work
11:30 am At the grocery store
11:30 am Grocery shopping with the kids. Always fun.
12:30 pm Fluffernutters for lunch
12:30 pm Ham and cheese lettuce wrap for me
1:30 pm Reading in the sun while the kids play
1:30 pm At the park with friends
1:30 pm Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood”
2:00 pm Daughter walking to the duck pond
2:00 pm Volleyball at the duck pond
2:30 pm Bare branches, ready for spring
3:00 Son’s sandy volleyball feet
3:30 pm Me making our spring wreath
4:00 Our forsythia wreath for spring
4:30 pm Emptying the diswasher for dinner dishes
4:30 pm Shredded chicken for tacos
5:00 pm Making simple syrup for cocktails
5:00 pm Happy hour! Rum sour
5:15 pm Making guacamole
5:30 Making salsa
6:00 pm The dinner table
7:30 Taco destruction
8:00 pm Iron Man 2 for movie night
6:00 am First things first. Coffee.
6:05 am My writing station, complete with green mug.
7:00 am Making lunch for husband.
8:00 am Body weight workout.
9:00 am Breakfast: Boiled egg with salt, Greek yogurt with honey, coffee with cream and sugar, newspaper
9:30 am Washing breakfast dishes.
10:00 am Prepping dinner for the crockpot.
10:00 am Onion saute with taco seasoning.
10:30 am Kids coloring addition-color-by-numbers. Their choice.
11:00 am Visiting dad at work.
11:30 am Pansies at the grocery store.
11:30 am Grocery shopping with the kids. Always fun.
12:30 pm Kids’ lunch: Fluffernutters.
12:30 pm My lunch: Ham and cheese lettuce wrap.
1:30 pm Reading in the sun while the kids play.
1:30 pm At the park with friends.
1:30 pm Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.”
2:00 pm Daughter walking to the duck pond with a big green ball.
2:00 pm Volleyball at the park.
2:00 pm Reading while the kids play.
2:30 pm Bare branches, ready for spring.
3:00 pm Son’s sandy volleyball feet.
3:30 pm Me making our spring wreath
4:00 Our forsythia wreath for spring.
4:30 pm Emptying the dishwasher for dinner dishes.
4:30 pm Shredded chicken for tacos.
5:00 pm Making simple syrup for cocktails.
5:00 pm Happy hour! Rum sour.
5:15 pm Making guacamole.
5:30 Making salsa.
6:00 pm The dinner table.
7:30 Taco destruction.
8:00 pm Iron Man 2 for family movie night.
After three years in Minnesota, I keep wondering when winter will arrive in Blacksburg. It’s January now. Shouldn’t I be warming my mug so its cold, greedy clay won’t suck all the heat from my coffee? Or pulling our down comforter up to my ears rather than kicking it off in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t I be wearing long johns, and furry boots, snow gloves and a knee length down coat?
Shouldn’t I be worried that my eyes will freeze open?
It is a strange sensation, this waiting. I keep checking the forecast, wondering when it’s going to get cold. I will see highs in the 50s, 40s, and even 30s and think, “It’s not here yet.” The bone chilling cold of highs in the single digits, and lows below zero, has not yet come.
It wasn’t until we hiked the Cascades again today, and I heard the constant, deafening roar of rushing water – the river throwing itself against rocks, a billion wet droplets slapping cold stone, torrents surging downstream, moving, moving, always moving – that I thought, hesitantly at first, then with growing glee, maybe this is winter here.
For the sounds we heard in Minnesota, outdoors, in January, were not liquid. January sounds were stiff, crisp. Quiet.
In Minnesota, at first, we thrilled at the foreignness of the deep freeze. It was adventurous! New! I could go grocery shopping and not rush home for fear of the food spoiling!
We reveled in the richness of winter life in the Twin Cities. Snow sculptures, intricate as marble carvings – of viking ships, lions, Tom Sawyer’s fence – endured, larger than life, for days at the state fair grounds, for temperatures didn’t climb high enough to melt them. Ice sculptures of diamond dragons, and crystal palaces, glittered in Rice Park, unafraid of a melting sun. Art shanties, modeled after ice fishing huts, sat merrily, confident in their safety, atop a frozen lake that we walked on. That cars were parked on. That cracked under our feet – a deep, ominous pop – as a pickup truck drove by us on the 15-inch thick ice. The only evidence of the chilling liquid beneath was the darkness we saw as we looked down a fisherman’s hole in the ice.
And the glacial fear in my heart.
Our second winter in St. Paul, I bought a pair of snow shoes. I’d bundle up, as plump with clothing as Randy in A Christmas Story, and crunch into the silent wilderness of Ft. Snelling State Park, located on an island surrounded by the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. When the snow was fresh and powdery, my snow shoes wouldn’t even crunch. They’d make more of a “poof” sound with each step. On those days, I’d poof, poof, poof over to the Mississippi River, and I would gaze in wonder at its stillness. For the surface of the mighty Mississippi, in January, was solid. Frozen. There were deer tracks in the snow that had fallen on it.
In Minnesota, I remember the relief, the dissolving, the thawing of my protective shell that came with the first time I would hear water drip outside. It was a beautiful sound, the sound of fat drops of water plopping to the ground. It was a sound full of life, and hope, and warmth after so much brittle cold.
So when we hiked today, and I heard the gushing of water in Little Stony Creek, and I watched its crystal-clear liquid cascade between mossy stones, I realized, this is January. This is our winter now. I relished every splash, every bubble, every sign of fluid. I snapped dozens of photographs of this streaming January water, with renegade droplets freezing like jewels on overhanging leaves, forming icicles that glistened with the full glory of winter’s crystalline beauty.
As we approached the waterfall, and the icicles grew thicker, and the air grew colder, and I had to put my camera away because my fingers were growing numb, I knew that winter will go deeper here. I know temperatures can plummet. I’ve seen pictures of the Cascades frozen over.
But there will also be Januaries like this one, where there are liquid and ice, and you don’t have to form a protective shell to make it through.
You would think that in November, when the trees are stripped bare, and the mountains are gray with twiggy branches, and the ground is brown with dead leaves, you would think that the color green would be hard to find. At least, that’s what I thought, until with green on my mind for a photography project, I found it everywhere. We hiked the Cascades yesterday, an Appalachian waterfall about 30 minutes west of Blacksburg, and the stream-side trail was resplendent in winter greens. We saw mosses, lichens, rhododendron, hemlock – life, ever green, persisting beneath the naked skeletons of deciduous trees. We saw ferns, bridges and stone signs tinted green with algae, pools of green where the crashing down of waterfalls aerated the water, green M&Ms in our trail mix. And always at hand to capture words, my tiny green Moleskine, its lined pages scratched with haiku.
Yesterday was our eight year old son’s special day*, where he got to pick a meal and a family activity for the day. Knowing his tendency towards lounging all day in PJs, I bribed him. I told him, “If you pick an active family activity, like, I dunno, hiking Dragon’s Tooth, I’ll make cinnamon rolls for breakfast.” Lucky for us, his sweet tooth pulls more weight than his lazy bones.
We’ve taken our kids on several hikes around Blacksburg, and they always love the first third of the trail. Then it all looks the same to them, and the boredom sets in, and they begin asking for snacks, telling us their legs hurt, wondering, “Are we almost at the top? Are we almost done?” Neither of us care about pushing our kids to be any certain way except the way that they are – we won’t push them to be scientists just because their dad is, or pastry chefs just because I like donuts and cupcakes and croissants – but we really, really, really do hope that they will enjoy and appreciate the outdoors. So we try to make it fun for them, taking them to waterfalls, pointing out cool spider webs, oohing and ahhing over golden leaves, showing them boulders they can climb. Playing 20 questions if it comes to that.
And most importantly, finding new trails that will keep them excited about the woods.
When I hiked Dragons’ Tooth with two girl friends a couple of weeks ago, a 2.4 mile trail (4.8 round trip) that involves nearly a mile of scrabbling over rocks, I knew the kids would love it. Their most recent hike was a really steep 2.3 mile hike (Angel’s Rest) with great views at the top and a beautiful trail to boot, but after a demanding 4.6 mile round trip, I think they were done with hiking for a while. We knew we had to pull out the big guns to get them excited again, so I showed our son photographs from the Dragon’s Tooth. Pictures of metal ladder rungs bolted into rocks, shots of sheer rock faces with the white blazes of the Appalachian Trail painted on them, photos of trail that was nothing but jagged ledges of stone. And the prize at the end of the hike? The Dragon’s Tooth itself – a massive sheet of rock, jutting 35 feet out of the ground like an ancient snarled tooth. That, and trail mix with M&Ms.
Our kids ran a good portion of the first half of the trail. They could not wait to get to the rocky part. And once we hit the boulders, and the sheer faces marked with the AT’s white blazes, and the rocky ledges, our kids may as well have been at Disney World. They were high as kites scrambling over those rocks, picking their own paths, hopping from boulder to boulder, then sprinting up the steep trail to the next technical patch. Our son declared, at least four times, “Dragon’s Tooth is the Best Hike Ever!”
The best part for me, though, was not just how much the kids loved the rocks (though that helped). It was the conversation. The morning was grey and raw, we had the trail to ourselves, and everything looked different than our normal hikes – more mysterious because of the mist and the dampness. On our way up, I pointed out some pink leaves that were still hanging on – papery ovals quivering in the deserted forest, ready to fall at any moment – and our son observed them, trying to pinpoint their exact color, when he finally proclaimed that they were peach. Not the darker orange color of peach flesh, but the delicate pinkish orange of their skin. He was specific about this.
When I exclaimed over lichens, plump and green like I had never seen them before – they were the same shape as the dessicated lichen discs we often see, and I wondered if they were those same black lichens, only hydrated – our daughter said, “They look like those noodles I like – the ones stuffed with chicken and cheese? Ravioli! They look like green ravioli.” And indeed, that was exactly what they looked like. I jotted this down for a future haiku.
On our descent, after both kids had climbed partway up the Dragon’s Tooth (our daughter wanted to climb higher, our son said he would never climb the tooth itself again – getting down off of it was too “freaky”) and after the four of us had eaten nearly two pounds of trail mix, the kids were subdued. They loved the rocky parts on the descent, but they were quieter as they scaled them. Once we were back down to the regular old hiking trail, we feared the tiredness and boredom would set in.
So we talked about farts. For probably 15 minutes. We talked about animals farting in the woods, and our son asked why we never smell them. So we said, “You can’t smell their farts if they’re not even around. Have you seen any animals today?”
“Yeah, chipmunks.”
“Well, chipmunks are pretty small. We probably wouldn’t be able to smell them anyway if they farted.”
Meanwhile, our son explored a hole in a tree, sticking his head inside to see what he could see.
“Be careful,” I said. “A chipmunk might stick his butt out and fart on you.”
And then we talked about chipmunk farts and what they probably sound like (a short pffft or bzzt, according to Dad). We talked about a bear’s fart after hibernation, and how godawful it would smell after being held in for three months. To which our son replied, “I fart in my sleep, why wouldn’t a bear?” Yes, this is true. We talked about bird farts, and how we can’t smell them because they’d be even tinier than chipmunk farts, and besides, birds are dainty and would fart high in the sky, where nobody would ever know.
And so on.
After the fart conversation died, I slowed down with our daughter and held her hand while we strolled through the leaf litter. She told me, “I know what function means now.”
“Oh yeah? What’s it mean?”
“It’s the job something does. Like on a plant, the seed’s function is to grow a new plant. The stem’s function is to hold up the plant and bring water to its different parts. The leaves’ function is to make food, and the flower’s function is to make seeds.”
And then she told me about the life cycle of a plant, all the while warming my big hand with her little one, impressing me with her first grade knowledge of botany. I thought I’d stump her when I asked what part of a plant a pine needle might be, but after thinking about it a minute, she answered “I think it’s a leaf because it comes off of the stem.” Right-o, Smart Tart.
We ambled our way back to the parking lot, glad we had hit the trail early, because now the lot was full. I smiled to myself. After hearing our son say somewhere along the way, “I love those peach leaves, and the little baby pine trees, and the ravioli on the rocks. Basically, I just love all the things that nature makes,” I had to agree with him that Dragon’s Tooth was the Best Hike Ever.
The Dragon’s Tooth, Catawba, VA
Peach leaves
Ravioli Lichens
Ladder rungs on AT
Rocky trail
Dragon’s Tooth in the clouds
*We instituted Special Days last year after feeling bad for dragging the kids around on errands, or feeling like we could never all agree on what to do on a Saturday afternoon. So now, we rotate. Each weekend, one of us gets a special day. On a person’s special day, in addition to getting to choose the brunch menu, a special dinner, or a dessert on their day, the special person also gets to choose a family activity. This motivates my husband and me to set aside a chore-free, errand-free time for the four of us to hang out, and it has been a huge hit with the kids. They’ve had a lot of fun trying new foods, going to the antique car show for Dad, going to the conservatory for me, and especially, not having to go to Home Depot or the shoe store when it’s their turn to be special. I highly recommend it.
Butterfly Mind 