Dancing

Dwarf Lake Iris

The morning fog lifts to reveal a roadside filled with small flowers, each thin green leaf glowing brightly and bearing a dewdrop that glistens beside its showy purple bloom.
Barely tall enough to cover the toe of my boot, this carpet of a hundred small faces turned to the sky rolls up and over the open space.




Scattered at their edge, where the rocky trail yields to a dense cedar and spruce forest, brilliant, winged, pink flowers snuggle close to the base of the aromatic trees.

Fringed Milkwort

I see a yellow slipper peeking from beneath the shaded grove.
This is northern Michigan,
and I believe this must be where I left my dancing shoes.

Yellow Lady's Slipper

I've just returned from a fabulous weekend workshop in Presque Isle County, Michigan.
Hosted by the NettieBay Lodge and led by Jim McCormac, we combed the countryside from the shore of Lake Huron to the Ocqueoc River and all that is between them. Fens and fields, wetlands and woods...and young forests of Jack Pine...there is a richness here that many have never seen.
And plenty of dancing shoes, if you've misplaced yours.

The Field of Dreams

Reflection

I have retired.
Not in the social security sense—
that age-determined status that promises perpetual care,
the reward for life’s contributions already made.
But in the sense of taking a changed path—
to determine each day the direction for myself,
to discover that contribution yet within me.

Damsel in the grass

From a car parked beside mine, a man left the gravel lot and walked off into the woods on a narrow trail barely visible through the eagerly reaching, green spring grass. On his back, lashed to a large pack that I suspected of hiding a camera, long-legged photographic paraphernalia swung with each step, as he disappeared into the undergrowth. It is a lovely spot where a broad lake attracts folks of all sorts for fishing and birding and thought. Yet, his determined stride had taken him away from all that. The object of his pursuit, uncertain to me.

painted turtle

I had come there to walk the trail as I had always walked it.
A wide, raised bank adjacent to the water ran a straight course north. On one side, sycamore trees bent low over the still surface, their gnarled fingers pointing to newly emerging lily pads, while on the other, turtles flopped, one after another, from the sunlit spot on a log into the safety of the steadily thickening green swill. Times before, I had watched from this edge as swans approached and posed for my camera to create a picture framed by the sycamore’s reflective arching arms. On this day, however, the geese commanded the lake. In the distance, the faded ring of cattails rimming the marsh drew the barest line between two oceans of blue.
For a moment, a fancily clad crane fly drew me several feet off course, as she bumbled about on long, striped legs before finally coming to rest clumsily on a thorny cane at my feet. Above me, a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers flitted in and out of the branches, their wheezy call the only sound along the trail.

Mute Swans on Spring Valley Lake

Canada Goose

Phantom Crane Fly

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher

teneral damselfly

Returning to my car, I was reminded again of the man who had turned from the lot and set off with such purpose into the nearby woods. He had come, conquered and gone, all in the time that I had wandered the water’s edge.

So, I ducked past the brushy boughs hiding its course into the woods and followed the path he had taken, slowly and quietly, to its very end in a farmer’s field. The dirt was freshly plowed, dark and warm under the afternoon sun and it rose to a point on the horizon where earth brown met sky blue.


Some wait for fields of roses.
Days filled with dandelions will be good enough for me.

Dandelion seedheads

The web

I could destroy in one blow
her fine house
of spun silk
woven with care
or leave it there
to capture the first light I might otherwise not see.

The sunny bank

Seeking Sunshine

Snow Trillium, Trillium nivale

I sat for a day in the woods, on a warm bank where some shrubs had filled the space beneath the bare trees and had already begun to leaf-out, while all else around stayed buried in the layer of dense brown leaves. Working with a small hand saw, I cleared the entire bank of them, creeping from one bush to the next, attacking each branch near its base, until I stopped for the day, utterly exhausted, yet pleased with the freshly cleared space.
Between the tall trees, there is a place now for their dropped seeds to set young roots, regrow these woods for years to come, help them to become healthy and strong.

Later that evening, I put my hand to my face to find the top of my nose sore, and upon looking in the mirror, red with an early sunburn, and one gained in the least of likely places—the woods.

Before the tall trees shade this brown bank, before the dimness of the woods becomes the home to thrush song, before the ferns and herbs emerge to drink in the shade of the summer forest, it is a place for wildflowers.

Snow Trillium, Trillium nivale

garter snake on sunny bank

First Hepatica

First frogs

Little Pond

Another warm night has begun.
I step into my tall wading boots, slip under the cover of a long dark jacket, and ease beneath the slender strap of the light which will hang from my shoulder. At my hip this large beam will freely swing, slung like a purse, as I walk hands-free exploring the edge of Little Pond in the hours approaching midnight. My final garment-- the heavy winter hat, one that would appear to be far more than is needed on this evening late in March, I casually stuff into one gaping pocket. For it is warm and mild, a night lit in moonlight revealing a faded field bathed in a mist, thick and welcome on my face.
I step out into the night, where from across the yard, the frogs are calling.

Spring Peeper, male calling

Like distant sleigh bells, the ring of spring peepers drawn to the basin of Little Pond sounds sweet and gentle, a light dusting of sound floating with ease on the heavy night air. I walk with each step, closer, down the path. And my light reveals the sudden retreat of hundreds of night crawlers, each shrinking back into its small hole as my footsteps approach their 8 to 10-inch emergence onto the lawn. In this warm and damp night, they have risen to revel amidst the short dew-studded grass before tunneling deep, beyond the reach of any summer drought. From the woods beyond Little Pond, a barred owl calls, and calls again.
I cross the berm into the shallow water of this vernal pool, 30 feet across and almost perfectly round. The sweet ring from small frogs mounts now with such volume that above it no other sound is heard. From my pocket, I retrieve the heavy hat and tug it snuggly down, covering my ears—a muffler against the din that has become an almost painful roar.
With a sweep of my light in a wide arc from side to side across the pool, the tiny tree frogs are hushed in an instant, surprised into a silence that quickly fades. In seconds, the first brave soul perched and projecting from a blade of grass, calls out into the night once more.
And the uproar begins again.

Spring Peeper breeding pair in amplexus
(smaller male clasping larger female as she lays eggs)

Wood Frogs' eye shine across Little Pond

In the beam of my light, the eyes of wood frogs return a golden glow as they float motionless across the darkened surface. Their quacking call, as if half dog, half duck, gathers them here from the woods yards away to breed in the waters of Little Pond. Large, ruddy females, eagerly clasped by the small, dark males, have already left compact clumps of eggs, golf ball-sized dark orbs, which by morning will have swelled to the size of grapefruits. Communal egg masses, gelatinous rafts several feet across will stretch to cover this quiet corner, moored to first-growing grass at the edge of Little Pond.

Wood Frog breeding pair

Wood Frog eggs

Wood Frogs leaving eggs in communal egg masses

Northern Leopard Frog breeding pair

Northern Leopard Frog pair in amplexus

Northern Leopard Frog eggs

Leopard frogs, too, large, but barely seen as the dark brown and green of their bodies blends with the tangle of grass at the edge, call to one another in a low, ticking snore.
These first frogs of spring, at any other time buried in the depths of the woods or under the cover of tall field grass, now stare back at me from the cool water of Little Pond. With my light, I have stepped into their darkened world.

Spring Peeper and Northern Leopard Frog
(for size comparison)

Sounds and silence

The sound of peepers fills the air.
With my eyes still closed in the dark of a cool, spring morning,
like sleigh bells through the field grass, their distant chime forecasts another warming day.




For weeks I’ve driven past the still snow-covered fields, each time, looking for a change—
a sign that this winter, longer than most and having left layer upon layer of snow, would lessen its hold. And along the trail, I’ve followed the footsteps of deer, whose tracks, preserved in snow, lie beside those of the coyote, though I know they pass here, each in their own time.

Horned Lark, Eremophila alpestris

Eastern Bluebird, Siala sialis

In the dark before dawn, I’ve heard the woodcock calling,
while, from the basin which I call Little Pond, wood frogs have begun to quack incessantly.
It is these sounds of spring, that speak for those most silent.
Who, drawn to the cool, clear waters of their birth,
with flashes of their long, spotted bodies, yet say, "spring."

Spotted Salamander, Ambystoma maculatum