Seen on the Sunday Ramble

Birds, beech conks, frozen apples and slow rambles by the creek were the order of the day.

The chickadees, nuthatches, tree sparrows and resident deer were hungry yesterday, and for a brief shining interval, there was a lovely fragrant stillness among the old beeches on the steep slope above the open creek. I photographed the conk there, then sat quietly for an hour listening to the wind in the beeches over my head and the water running over the rocks below.

The creek begins its odyssey or voyage at a hidden spring in the woods nearby where the water emerges in tiny energetic geysers from granite reservoirs several hundred feet underground. The water bubbles up to the surface icy cold and clear all year long, flowing like a small and resolute (but headstrong and very turbulent) moldau through the trees and down toward the beaver pond. In the depths of winter, it freezes entirely only a few hundred metres from the destination for which it longs so much and toward which it is traveling so ardently. So near and yet so far, little river. . . .