#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Shadow Fern
Soon everywhere, with glory through and through,
The fields will spread with every brilliant hue.
But high o’er all the early floral train,
Where softness all the arching sky resumes,
The dogwood dancing to the winds’ refrain,
In stainless glory spreads its snowy blooms.~ Excerpt from “Dogwood Blossoms,” by George Marion McClellan
Ahhhh. Done with all the landscaping, raking, brush clearing, planting, now I am delighted to be out early, simply to walk into the woods and see what is coming into bloom. I head toward Lady Slipper Row where my daughter, two days ago, saw a slipper with a lovely unopened bud. But I don’t find one with a bud, only little hips springing up through the leaves. I know they will come soon. I take a long ramble and soon come to the dogwood blossoming against a true blue sky. I am listening to, at night, as I fall asleep, Suzanne Simard’s book on Audible, Finding the Mother Tree. It’s a quiet, slow moving memoir, scientifically fascinating exploration of the wisdom of forests by a Canadian woman scientist.
“In Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard demonstrates how storytelling can ignite something science alone cannot. Her research in underground tree communication through a “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal fungi will be familiar to readers of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, while one of the characters in Richard Powers’s The Overstory was heavily inspired by Simard’s life and work in forest ecology.”
After my walk, I am so excited. I pack up my handouts and a bag lunch, and drive to my friend’s house on Farm Pond to meet, in person! with the Farm Pond Writers! We are giddy with conversation and excitement about being together on the pond, once again, to write and share in person. Our time flies by. Still, we are giddy with more more talking and sharing as we move to her picnic table and have our bag lunches. We cannot get enough of being together after all these months and months. Tonight, I tweak my poem for tomorrow, send it off. I have not been in the yard today, and I’m grateful to hear that my daughter did some watering. I turn in early tonight to be with the wisdom of the mother tree.