Asakiyume mita

We went for a walk at Bright Water Bog in Shutesbury, MA, yesterday. It was a misty, moisty, equinoctial day, with ice still present in places.

It was perfect. I do love-love-love places that blur water and land. Best of all? There were cranberries. Enchanting.

Cranberry, lower portion of the photo


( two more photos of two other cranberries, in case, like me, you can't get enough of them )

I saw a few just out of reach and was going to put a foot off the boardwalk and onto a tussock to pick one.

"I don't know if that's solid," Wakanomori said.

So I pressed on it with my hand, and down, down my hand went into that cold water. Not solid! Magic.

Canada geese or maybe otters or moose deliver mail here, I think:


Actually it's a geocache location.... shhhhhhh

This lichen-bespangled pine sapling is enjoying the acidity of the bog.


So much beauty--a mingling world of blurred boundaries.

Perhaps you're in the mood for a change of pace?

We went for a walk through a landscape transformed by beavers. It's always been marshy; they have turned it into their own habitat. There are frogs in here, and red-winged blackbirds flying over the reedy parts, and redstarts singing in the skunk-cabbage parts.





We saw a great tree, SO TALL, that will soon be down:



Evidence (pond-facing side):



Some extra gnawing (trail-facing side):



Again, that tree is TALL:



So think of beavers. There was no pond before but there is a pond now.

I realized that the charming watermelon I'd bought at a farm stand came with a map imprinted on its rind--I guess all watermelons do; how did I not notice?



It's a map of a wetland, rivers threading through buoyant land--the dark green is the rivers, the light green is the land, but you can see how streamlets are woven right into the land. You can travel by boat along the rivers, and the marshgrass is so high no one will see you the next river over.

Watermelons keep these maps on their rinds because they are water melons.

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):

wakanomori ran a marathon this past weekend, in Portland, Maine (and did very well!) While he was running, I was admiring the salt marshes in the bay. When I started walking, the tide was out, and I was feasting my eyes on all the colors, and on the wave-tufts of the semi-flattened grasses:





I liked looking at all the treasures in the tideline:



( feathers and a crab )

But what was most mesmerizing and enchanting was when the tide started coming in--insistent ripples pushing in on the grass:



And the grass and ripples were like calligraphy--words written on water:

Two days ago, Writer's Almanac quoted Marjory Stoneman Douglas, eulogizer of the Everglades, who said of them,

Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness . . . the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the blue heights of space . . . the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose . . . it is a river of grass.

(vast glittering openness
sweet massive winds
blue heights of space
a river of grass)

One day I'll see them. For now, here is my own Everglades, waiting to be reborn.



Nearby a male turkey was displaying for an only moderately interested crowd.



One more picture, this from yesterday--the turbulent sky ocean