Asakiyume mita

It's been more than a week since I posted! Part of that's just life being busy; part is that osprey_archer is here!

Today we went to Bright Water Bog, swung on a swing, ate some cranberries, and saw ice forming. It was sunny, but a cold wind was blowing, and a few flurries of snow came down.



(We also went to the Smith College Botanical Gardens, but this is a drive-by post! So there's only the one photo.)

a_soft_world came to visit, and she and I and the healing angel made a trip to the Hawley Bog, a place A Soft World had visited as a child.

It was drizzly and misty, full of birdsong and a strange, distant, vibrating noise that may have been someone trying, at regular intervals, to start an engine and failing, or that may have been the bog itself, shifting and thumping, somehow. When you get out into the bog proper, signs direct you to walk no more than two to a section of boardwalk, so as not to risk breaking the bog mat--30 feet of peat floating on a glacial pond.

It's still early spring there--pickerelweed just beginning to send out leaves, tightly curled fiddleheads rising from cinnamon-colored paisley curls of old fronds, and the sphagnum moss more pink-peach-red than green. But so, so soft, so soft and bouncy--if the water didn't well up when you pressed, you'd be tempted to press your cheek to it.

I didn't have a camera, but a_soft_world gave me permission to post hers.

Here's what it looked like overall:



And here is a circle of pitcher plants, communing with each other:



Here's just one, rising from last year's fern fronds:



Here two of us are on the boardwalk:



And here's a shrub, not yet in leaf, that seems to have the Witches Broom infection (lots of this shrub had this):