A Monday meander with the fishies

Super high tide, when the fish swim in the woods.

There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.

~ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

The pond at high tide.

Since it is October, and that means Walktober (dates and rules and such can be found here — you’ll have to scroll down just past the image of the fisherman at the Point — and more general information is here), I thought this would be a good month for me to go back to my (almost) daily walks.  Hmmm.  That’s not quite accurate.  I do take daily walks.  There is no “almost” about it.  I don’t blog about them daily anymore, something I sometimes miss from the year of getting outside everyday (and blogging about it).  If you follow that last link and wonder about being at a different blog, Life in the Bogs is my old blogging hangout.

We’ll walk by the vegetable garden on our way to the woods. The morning glories live on the garden fence. And sometimes on the tomato plants.

The photos in this post are from a walk I took with M on Saturday.  We went out to watch the fish swimming on the woodland trails.  Regular visitors here are familiar with such magical events, but for those of you who aren’t, we occasionally get super high tides that flood the marshes and woods.  The fish come in with the tide and swim through the woods, all the way to the edge where the lawn meets the main woodland trail.

We should stop by and say hello to the zinnias in the scrounger’s garden while we’re out and about. Their season will end soon.

Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates’s declaration that ‘Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.’ Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

~ Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot

The water came up over my wellies here.

To be honest, Saturday was not a good day for taking photographs.  A bright gray heavy cloud cover sat overhead, and that kind of day tends to blow out images.  The air was thick with humidity, too, and that leaves things looking a little misty.  You can almost see the moisture in the air in the above photograph.

Water leaving the path and swirling out towards the trees.

I waited patiently in hopes of capturing a picture of the fish swimming on the trail, but alas, they didn’t fall for my statue imitation.  You will have to visualize that for yourself, small schools of fish weaving around the grasses on the pathways.

Nearing the shipwreck in the woods.  (It’s not really a shipwreck but an old wooden boat someone left there long ago, and there is less to see of it now than there was when we moved here because the wood is returning to the earth.)

It is difficult, too, to capture the image of a fish swimming on the trail because of the light and the reflections.  Even the plant life eludes me at times.

Squiggles and ripples, an abstract reflection.

I love sloshing around on the trails with the fish, maybe because I’ve never seen such a thing until we moved here to the Eastern Shore and to the Wabi-Sabi Ranch.  Although I’ve seen the phenomenon several times, it hasn’t yet ceased to amaze me.

Curling.

That’s about it from me and from the Wabi-Sabi Ranch on this beautiful October Monday.  The air is bright and fresh and drier than it has been.  Dry enough that I have laundry out on the line instead of in the dryer.  There are clouds, but they are the big, puffy clouds that only occasionally block the sun and leave large expanses of blue sky in between.

A mushroom in the water.

Thank you for stopping by and joining me on another walk.  I always appreciate your company.  Sunset, at 6:42 PM, might be interesting.  Let’s meet at the Point to see what kind of show Mother Nature puts on this evening.  Be sure to bring some insect repellent.  The mosquitoes took advantage of all the rain we had last week to make a big comeback.

We were unable to make it all the way out to the dock on this walk. The water was too high, and appeared to be rushing up over most of the dock. In this photo, you can see it coming up over the boardwalk that leads to the dock.

Be good, be kind, be loving.  Just Be.  🙂

Another zinnia, just because.

A few of the 10,000 reasons to be happy:  11) Big, puffy white clouds sailing across a deep blue sky.  12) The scent of autumn in the air.  13) Cooler, drier air that makes being outside more pleasant.  14) The tartness of hibiscus tea.  15) Chocolate, because it’s chocolate.  Who needs a reason?  😉

Reminder:  Walktober 2016 will take place between October 15 through the 23, with submissions due by October 25.  I will post an official “link here” walk on or around October 15.  Not sure what Walktober is or if you want to join?  Follow the link over in the sidebar (it’s the third widget up from the bottom labeled “Join us in October!”).  If the dates don’t suit you for some reason, let me know.  I’ll be glad to extend them.  I’m easy that way.