I have to say that there are some stunningly beautiful , peaceful, quiet, memorable moments available to us, even in hard times. We must chase them down and live in them whenever possible.
Another Autumn Walk
Tag: nature photography
Northwoods Journal: Changes
Back several weeks ago, in July, we were getting ready for our family reunion, enjoying walks like the one in my last post, and having a great summer. And then the husband had a stroke, a cerebral vascular hemorrhage (CVA). He has survived but our lives have changed, a lot.
Since then, most of what I’ve written has gone in a separate blog, one that tells the story of our experience since his diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia. I won’t tell it again here, but in summary, we now have first hand knowledge of ICU’s, ventilators, tracheostomies, feeding tubes, and several other things that the husband never wanted to know about.
This is the first day in five weeks that I’ve been home all day. Dennis is in a rehab hospital now, a really good place, and making progress slowly. I felt he would be okay if I didn’t see him every day. The hospital is in Duluth, 90 miles away, and I’ve grown a little weary of the drive. I’m often in the car eating things I shouldn’t eat, just to stay awake – a bag of popcorn can last nearly 70 miles if I don’t spill too much of it.
Although I have wonderful support from friends and family, these changes leave me feeling physically alone quite often. Fortunately, I am spiritually befriended. God is such a friend. Jesus is such a friend. I took a walk this evening, kind of like the one in my last post, on the wetlands trail and saw evidence of my friends. It was almost like things were being pointed out, to look at, to talk about and enjoy. And I took pictures, of course.
It’s September now. August was surreal, hard, and so different from anything we have known. We have yet to find out what our new normal will be. But it’s coming, and it will be okay.
Northwoods Journal: Summer
It is sinking in that summer is really, finally here. This usually happens about four weeks before it gets cold again, so I am being very much in the present, eyes wide open, walking without a jacket, swatting at deer flies and even getting a bit warm at times.
It is getting late, almost 8:30 but I have sunlight still and it’s been a few days since I walked the wetland trail. We’ve had regular rain so the meadow is green. There are a few clouds but no wind. The sunset is getting better by the minute.
Even with the rain, the creeks and ponds are low but I love the way this one looks like a ribbon of reflected light.
The first sections of my path go past fields where milkweed plants abound. They are in full flower now which makes for a rather stunning plant. I often see deer in the fields in the evening and tonight I got to lock eyes with this young fellow. I thought he was stunning too.
Farther out in the marsh, I’m seeing “my geese”. I’m getting a sense of ownership – after all I’ve watched them grow up. Most of them look like adults now. Tonight they have the company of a pair of sand hill cranes. None of them seem to mind that I am taking pictures of them so I spend quite a bit of time watching.
Passing the wildflower field makes me happy because the black eyed susans are the color of happy. Passing the wildflower field also makes me sad because black eyed susans are a mid to late summer flower and I don’t want summer to be over anytime soon.
I am reminded that this beautiful greenspace used to be a small golf course every time I see this sign, which now makes me laugh. It’s all green so I guess we can exit anywhere we want to.
The sun is nearly down and I am feeling like I’ve just had a shower of peace and blessing. Even the deer flies have gone to bed and are no longer following me. Time to be thanking God for helping me to be here in this place, at this time. Time to rest. Thanks for coming along.
June Journal: Week 3
Life in the northwoods of Wisconsin, one week at a time, in the brief but beautiful summer.
June 12
I felt tired today, and with an attitude that I can’t quite find a name for. It made me a little less smiley everywhere I went, quieter, maybe a bit sharp in my inner talk and resigned to having to hold it in. No sense in letting impatience, crabbiness and frustration show when it would only make things worse.
Church, family brunch in the party garage, and then my friend Gwen and I got on bikes and rode the trails for 10 miles. That was the best part of the day. That, and the moon which I noticed as I was pulling the blinds shut before sleep.
June 13
Still tired. Still crabby (under cover). I wonder if this is my way of having Covid…. although it seems I would have at least one other symptom. It can’t be Covid this week because I have too many medical appointments for myself and others – precious appointments that we’ve waited forever to have.
At the follow up visit to my foot doctor I told her how the heel pain wasn’t changing all that much and she gave me a few more suggestions. She liked my new athletic shoes. I knew she wanted to see them but I wasn’t sure which shoes to show her. I have clean ones and dirty ones that I wear most of the time. In fact, I probably change shoes four or five times a day, trying to protect my sensitive feet outside and trying to protect the floors inside.
It’s laundry day. Not that I consistently do laundry on Mondays, but that I consistently do it when the baskets are full and there’s no more clean underwear.
Over at Walmart I discovered that I could edit the part of pictures that I wanted printed. Eureka!! For twelve more cents I got a better representation of Simba, one with a head. Mom and I made a collage of family pets for the reunion. We are quite the animal lovers.
June 14
Big accomplishments today were returning a book to Delores, checking the garden, cleaning the garage, and moving furniture in the living room. Dennis is having trouble steering his walker – the path from the recliner to the bathroom has to be wider.
June 15
After watching an ad for apple cider vinegar gummies (can’t remember why this interested me) I decided to take some vinegar the last two mornings. I didn’t dilute it very much today and it about tore my throat out. I thought that was why I felt kind of sick with a bad headache.
Dennis had been waiting for days to get in to the chiropractor so I took him in the afternoon. I wore a mask and didn’t stay in the room with him but waited outside. Went to Walmart after and picked up a home Covid test.
I HAVE COVID, after more than two years of avoiding it. And it would have to be now, on the day I have a massage scheduled. Wonderful.
Spent the rest of the day cancelling my life for the next week or so.
The good thing is that after testing, Mom is negative for the virus. She has to be able to keep her appointment on Friday or she won’t be seen until January 2023!
June 16
Second day of headache, even though I’m throwing everything I’ve got at it. The fever is making my eyes hurt. Had I been well, both the husband and I would have had doctor’s appointments today, skin checks. I would also have seen my client at the Resource Center.
I got my SoloStove cleaned out and packed in its case for the bonfire night at church, which I won’t be going to. Emailed around to find another keyboard player for Sunday worship, which I also won’t be going to. Cancelled a visit with my cousin from Indiana which would have been on Saturday.
Spent a lot of time going back and forth from my recliner to the bed, trying to sleep/rest. My neighbor brought chicken soup for us.
Dennis doesn’t seem to have any symptoms and I hope he doesn’t get it. I try to spend as little time around him as possible, but meals are hard. I didn’t want to cook supper so asked him if he wanted a shake. He looked disappointed and didn’t answer for a while, then said “You know I don’t really like steak all that much any more.” We got that figured out to our great relief and satisfaction.
June 17
I slept pretty good last night. The headache has changed and is no longer continuous. It’s now periodic sharp stabs of pain in the temples, and somehow I prefer that. I’m coughing now and still have a low grade fever. I have little interest in productive activity – it’s the recliner and the bed for naps.
Den (brother) took Mom to EauClaire for her appointment with the eye specialist.They did a biopsy and won’t know for several days whether basal cell carcinoma is confirmed or not. They did tell her that this surgery takes a hospital stay and it is not something to look forward to, but might be necessary.
It seems like there are a lot of unpleasant surprises lately and it makes me wonder what we are doing right that makes the family such a target.
June 18
I am determined to be more normal today, and it is working. A beautiful morning outside where I had my breakfast on the patio. Mom came over to sit with me a while and we caught up on each other’s news of the last four days since I’ve been isolating. She doesn’t feel real well and thinks she has Covid too, even though she had a negative test a couple days ago. She told me that if she dies of Covid, we should wait and have her memorial during the family reunion in August. That way she would have some people at her event. Always the practical one… At this point there is no reason to think she won’t be alive and well in August.
I picked flowers. This is what June looks like in Wisconsin.
Fall Fun
I’ve just spent a considerable amount of time changing the header that you see on my blog from leafless, bare trees to beautiful fall colored leaves. I’m keeping this one up until the first snow because I want to remind myself of all the FUN I’ve had walking in the woods, taking drives, and photographing our beautiful autumn 2021.
Although I don’t have to go out any further than our parking lot to see some color, I do go out, taking Mom on drives in the car and hiking and biking on the trails. Things change daily. We’ve gone from mostly green with a few brilliant splashes to mostly bare with a few brilliant splashes. Even though the leaves are getting mostly on the ground now, they are just as beautiful. It’s like finding little gems all over the paths and lawns.
We’ve had an unseasonably long period of warm weather this October. Instead of being shocked by early snows, I’m still picking raspberries and working in the garden (in shorts and T-shirts). I know that will change and I can’t help it, I’m sad. Summer is too short, autumn is beautiful and winter is… long. Really long.
So here is a sampling of what I see and enjoy on a daily basis. It’s only a small percentage of the number of pictures I have on my phone and in the cloud. Finding things to photograph is definitely one of my “fall funs”.
The Beauty of the Earth
“For the beauty of the earth, for the beauty of the skies, for the love which from our birth, over and around us lies; Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.”
Looking Up
Looking Out
Looking Down
Thank you for taking this autumn walk with me.
Mullein Hill
Often, I go over just to walk around it and marvel. It was a sand pile. We live in a wide river valley where the soil is more sand than anything else. My brother had the sand put there during a construction project just to get it out of the way, and for a long time it was just sand. Nothing much grew on it.
Then this started happening. A plant that I’ve seen and admired on my walks seemed to love this sand hill. It’s so different from other plants that I had to look it up. It’s mullein.
The young rosettes are a soft grey-green, and the leaves are fuzzy, kind of like velvet or fleece. They are biennial, which is to say that it takes two years for them to flower and produce seeds. But when they do produce seeds, they spread prolifically. The seeds can be viable in soil for up to ten years. Some people call them weeds because of that but other people plant them in their gardens.
The flower stalk, which you can see in my later pictures, is really pretty. In addition to that, the plant has been used for ages to soothe coughs, sore throats, and deep lung congestion. Early settlers would make tea from the leaves, and found it helpful for treating TB. Mullein originated in Europe and came here early in our country’s history but by the 1800’s, it had spread everywhere from one coast to the other.
I like this plant. It has taken over the sand pile, which is why I’ve named it Mullein hill. There are a lot of other wild plants and flowers filling in the spaces on the hill which make it even more interesting. It looks a bit magical and I wanted to share it with you all. Mullein Hill.
It’s June
It’s June, only 20 days away from the longest day of the year. The sun was still quite a way above the horizon at 7:30 pm when I took the picture above. In spite of this, last week we had a couple nights below freezing. The night it got down to 28 degrees, my new potato plants froze. They had just gotten above ground and were looking so healthy and strong. Everything else in the garden got covered with tarps and sheets and survived. It is light now at 5:15 am so maybe everything will grow fast and produce before the short summer is over.
I took several walks this week. It is scary how fast the trees went from bare to fully leafed out. It’s like they know they have to hurry. The wooded trails are SO BEAUTIFUL! My walks go slow because I am always stopping to take pictures, or identify bird calls. It all looks lovely to me and is like medicine for my soul.
Yesterday’s walk was past a beaver pond and a large marsh. I pushed through the bushes to get a view of the water and watched a family of ducks swimming. The cattails started rustling and moving and out of them came the largest raccoon I have ever seen. It had a grizzled white head and was prowling through the marsh, probably looking for nests with eggs. Later I saw a pretty box turtle digging a hole in the dirt for her eggs
It was a good walk. I am still counting steps – 13,000 yesterday and 10,000 today. The last two weeks I have been working on getting the garden going instead of walking, but even then it was easy to get 5,000 to 7,000 steps tilling, carrying mulch and fixing fence.
Suddenly, it is summer in this crazy, wild, northern place.
All Trails Project: Henks Park Trails
This trail was not on the All Trails app, but it should be! I have learned how to suggest it be added and plan on doing that.
Another warm fall day was given to us in Wisconsin so I took another hike. In case you think time spent walking is time wasted, let me tell you it is not. Something about the rhythm of walking, and the peaceful, natural environment is perfect for creative thinking. If only I could remember all the ideas that come to me out in the woods…
Henks Park has recently appeared off a road I have traveled for years. Only about five miles south of Hayward on State Highway 27, it is well marked with nice maps available at the parking area. There are numerous loops of varying lengths. I explored today and was able to walk three miles without retracing my steps. All loops are in beautiful, deciduous woods with glacial ravines and hills. The nearest highway is out of sight but close enough to be heard – it is not a remote area and it would be hard to get lost.
There are picnic tables near each loop and a gazebo at the parking area. This kind of wooded area has deep ravines, most of which have a marsh or pond at the lowest elevation. There are hills to climb. I tried to photograph the ups and downs of the trail but the topography is hard to capture. The trail is well groomed and leaf covered in most areas – great for walking but I would not have wanted to be riding a bike up the leaf covered slopes.
I thoroughly enjoyed this bunch of trails and want to go back soon and record them for the All Trails App (unless the technology is more than I can figure out). Check out this beautiful park!
All Trails: Spring Creek
I needed this walk to clear my head, and my lungs. The day was just too beautiful to stay inside.
I’m excited. After a couple weeks of recovery from travel (and from the broken wrist and surgery) I’m exploring a new app on my phone called “All Trails”. It’s designed to show hiking trails all over the U.S. and today it led me to one only 15 miles away that I hadn’t been on yet. One thing we have a lot of up here in northern Wisconsin is hiking trails and many of them are within a few minutes or hours of home – so why not make it a project to see how many I can explore? I needed an interesting challenge and now I have one.
Spring Creek Trail was a 2.5 mile loop that was labeled “easy”, and it was. Part of it was through the forest on a bike trail maintained by CAMBA (Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association) and about half of it was on a dirt road called Spider Lake fire lane.
I enjoy hiking with friends but sometimes I’m glad to be hiking at all, even if it’s alone. I didn’t mind being alone today. I didn’t see another person, or even another vehicle once I got off the main highway. The app tracks my progress on the trail, so I wasn’t worried about losing my way. But, I should have started with a fully charged phone battery, and will have to make that a priority in the future.
I assumed the water I crossed over right away was Spring Creek. It was moving fast from our October snow melt. Yes, we’ve had 6 inches of snow on the ground already and some of it was still visible in the ravines, but today’s temp was 73 degrees! Several times on this walk I was aware of a stream of cold air coming off the low spots in the woods. There was ice on most of the pools.
I kept hearing a noise that sounded like a muffled motor starting up and assumed I was somewhere near a road. It took me a while to realize I was stirring up grouse on the trail. They take off through the trees and make a pretty cool sound. I also saw several deer on the trail ahead that turned to stare at me before running off into the woods. They were dark and almost invisible when they were looking at me, but hard to miss when their white tails started bouncing away. So beautiful.
This was an afternoon hike, around 3 pm, which I thought would give me plenty of time. It did, but already the days are short and the sun was getting low on the horizon, making the woods dark in places. The slanting light, shadows and silhouettes kept me using more of my limited phone battery for pictures – I couldn’t resist. Here’s my photo log of the Spring Creek Hike.
I Just Have to Say... 