These past weeks have been something of a long goodbye to the woods. I'm trying to soak up as much of them as I can. Each sight. Each sound. Each smell. Each tree. Each insect. Each morning when the sun peeks over the mountain and the baby dances his feet over the shifting shadows of the leaves on the floor.
Speaking of flowers, I don't know that there's ever been an autumn where I've noticed such numerous and varied blooms.
There are many yellow and white, and some purple, blooms, along with a pinkish-white here and there. In this post's picture, you'll notice a yellow wing stem, which the monarchs particularly love. Also, the woodland sunflower and goldenrod are blooming along near every roadway or trail. The white and purple asters are riotous, as well as the spectacle of a tall spindly-stemmed specimen called a New York ironweed, with its own pops of brilliant purple at the end of each stem. Walls of bush clover gave their reams of pink and the thistles—oh my—the thistles are a sight to see.
There are so many things flowering now, and with the grass turning its shades of tan and rust and mauve as a backdrop, you'd think it was spring again.
Even though autumn does not officially start for another day or two, the cold has descended in the nights, along with frost warnings on the phone, and a chilliness lingers in the delves and draws of the mountain. You walk down the road and cross a stream and suddenly the hair stands up on your arms. It is as if you walk through a cool curtain, leaving one place and entering another.
You can tell it's autumn by the smell on the air, by the slant of the sun, the whiteness of its touch on the skin, in the eye, the crunch of the sycamore leaves on the path, the sense that the green growth has stopped and all dries—as there's not been any rain for almost two weeks—and readies for the long winter sleep, as it is, here, in the Appalachian woods over the Shenandoah.
A drive along a back road today, heading towards Shepherdstown, took us by the apple orchards, each tree bursting with red and pale green bunches (my wife remarked as to why they hadn't been picked yet—lack of workers due to the pandemic?). The corn is crispy and golden. The soybeans yellow in spots; steadfastly green in others.
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We laid our old dog's ashes under the paw paws we planted in the back of the property. Her name was Maria and she died over a year ago. But, with the move across country, there are a lot of things of which we are forced to decide: take it or leave it. Maria will remain here, under the paw paws.
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We've been making the rounds of nearby trails and hiking spots. Each one we visit we know it will almost certainly be the last time we are ever there. The weather has been particularly gracious to us these last couple of weeks and enabled us in this endeavor.
One such place we visited last week is hands-down one of the most spectacular spots I've ever been. And to think it's just down the road, has always been just down the road, via the trail along the river. We had never hiked the river trail in autumn; it was always for the Dutchman's breeches and bloodroot in spring we ventured under its 80-ft tall rocky abutments.
But the small white wildflowers of spring are nothing compared to the splendor of the autumn fields...
Down the trail, further than we usually go, into the bend in the river, and fields open up out of the floodplain forest. Fields unlike anything I've ever seen before. The wild stem, tall as I am, made frothy lakes of yellow through which we walked like Moses through parted seas.
In every direction, interspersed between crisscrossing woodlines, the fields of bloom went on.
Thistles of such stature they outgrew the sycamore saplings, bedecked with flush purple crowns such that they almost tipped over with the weight of their visual bounty.
I wanted to walk on forever in those fields... and to think we only just now found it out. But the bees knew it—if you stood still the hum of hundreds of honeybees and bumblebees vibrated the very air about you. The monarchs knew it. The mating praying mantises I almost stepped on knew it.
It makes me wonder what other wonders await me in these woods which only a skink, or perhaps a gnat, know the secret of. But I won't know. Not anymore. We're leaving these woods and journeying to a new place of new natural wonders.
Yet my memory's eye will turn back to here, to this field, at this time, and they will yearn for sight of the fields of wild stem once again.
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On another last jaunt, we followed a trail we'd never gone done before even if we'd gone up and down the ones adjoining it. And that's where I found it: the dying place.
There's a place in the woods where the tulip trees are tall and slender, young by all accounts. The maples are already beginning to drop red and yellow leaves. Their tops sway against the gray sky and the sound of their branches in the wind fills the empty spaces between the silver boughs. Ferns grow in lush patches across the crunchy floor. White-cap mushrooms shoot up in onesies and twosies (you know their mycelium enmesh and connect everything together through the loam), while logs rot and crumble and are themselves consumed.
You walk off the path to be in this place because you want to be lost in it. There's a part of you that never wants to leave, that, indeed, resides here always, that dies here and is itself consumed.
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It is likely my next post will be in a new place. But I will remember the woods of this mountain, this Shannondale, this Shenandoah. They are more than just woods to me. Under each leaf, whispered over the tops of the canopy, crawling along the redolent humus, there is a dream and it is my dream and yours and it waits to be heard, to be smelled, to be seen, by us, in the woods over the river and under the mountain.
And that's the last of it from here on the mountain.