moss | Good to be Home

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I was getting stir crazy so tied my boots on and went outside to visit a friendly cat and walk around. I gathered four eggs and picked up some garbage off the lawn (tis the season).

Then, the schoolbus came and let off Seth and Sarah and suddenly I had a willing little friend to walk with me. We thought we would go to the end of the road and back but she said “Can we go in the woods?” and naturally I said, “Of course!”

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We couldn’t help but admire all the moss, I wonder if it was because it was the only green in the forest and it just naturally drew our eyes. We liked how it lifted off the rocks just like a rug. Sarah put it carefully back.

We even reclined on moss.

We saw the first frog eggs of the spring, always worth bending down for a look-see. Sarah would NOT touch them.

But I don’t mind the feel of frog eggs, I quite like it. The water was like ice, though, and my motherly heart just knew they would need a few warm days in order to hatch.

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She was determined to take me to Murkwood, one of Grace’s old haunts that she found and named and showed to her little sister.

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Going on this walk made Sarah’s imagination kick into high gear and soon I was being called BrightHeart instead of mom. Her name was FlameStar which I never could get right. She seemed more like a TwinkleToes to me.

Mostly she said, “Come on, BrightHeart” but one time when I was in front of her she said, “Slow down BrightHeart, you don’t want to get too far ahead of your leader.” And then I knew she really was imagining things.

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I thought I found a hedgehog but then I realized it was just moss again.

(I started imagining things, too)

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I carried this pretty twig the whole walk and guess what? Sarah, I mean FlameStar, changed my name!! To TwigHeart. I wasn’t sure what to think of that. I guess I have a heart of wood.

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This made my heart happy. I saw in the distance a flow of sticky pine pitch down the side of a tree so we went over to take a look and discovered a tick STUCK fast to the pitch. As I look at this photo I can also see a tiny black caterpillar stuck there, too. The tick was still alive, too, but stuck. I was intrigued but Sarah looked off into the distance and waited in disgust for me to be done.

Skunk cabbage, I broke a piece off to have Sarah smell it and she hated it.

She’s particular about what she wants to experience.

However, she loved the water… she loved the rocks …she loved the trees …she loved the moss. She was happy. Just please don’t show her ticks or make her smell skunky things.

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There are many different kinds of moss. If you touch them, some are soft and some are rough, some are wet and some are dry. Some look like tiny ferns and some look like underwater grasses. Some is short like carpet, some is fluffy and makes you wish you were tiny enough to snuggle within it. Some is bright green, it hurts your eyes, and some like the moss growing on this boulder, is the deepest darkest forest green.

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“I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too…………” Robert Frost

Before I went on my long walk I stopped at the chicken coop to open the doors and check for eggs. I found three in the barrel, along with a chicken. I took all three eggs and put them in my pocket but one of them must have had a thin shell because it promptly broke as I did so. I’m not disgusted by much, but a warm gooey egg popping in my pocket is one of them. I threw the shell out in disdain, along with an egg covered tissue. I bent down and rubbed my hand off in the snow and went on my walk with a soggy pocket leaving egg residue on my jeans with each step.

I was glad I had decided to put on boots as I walked through hard snow, slushy snow, mud, running water, puddles, and regular ol’ dry forest ground, too. My feet stayed dry. It was 50 degrees and I wore a sweatshirt and a jacket and was nice and warm.

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I thought this was fun, doesn’t it look like a mushroom?

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Soon my eyes were opeed and I was seeing alive things, mainly birds…….

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Birds have such elegant lines.

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This one was flying SO SO FAST!!!

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Like a rocket going across the sky.

I sat down on the hill and looked at my phone, lost in my own little world and resting in the fresh air and quiet. Then, I looked up to see a brown animal walking straight toward me out of the woods.

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We looked right into each other’s eyes and gazed. Then, as I picked up my camera, he turned around to run away. Thankfully he stopped to look back a couple of times.

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He lifted his upper lip and showed me his smile.

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Then he ran off like a little bear.

Never in all my days!!!

I figured out it was a fisher, the second largest member of the weasel family in our area, the first being a river otter. I read online that fishers are useful in eating porcupines, however they are also known to eat housecats. This one better not eat any of my housecats! Or chickens!

Well, nothing could top that but I kept trudging along nice and slow. I stood here in the woods for a while listening to a woodpecker, the thing about them being they sound so close but you peer and peer and can’t see them. Finally I stopped being stealthy and moved in confidence and sure enough it flew and I saw it but then of course I coudn’t take a photo. But I did see another small and sweet bird busy buzzing up and down tree bark looking for insects to eat.

See if you can spy it.

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