The Colors of Things To Come

Last night the local TV weatherman gave his "next three months" forecast: It'll be dry as dust, will frost in October and, he actually said this twice, might snow before the end of that month. November the pits also. But I knew anyway that when August comes the party of summer is pretty much over. "August is a September month," poet Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary. She preferred July. I prefer June. May is better. Anyway, can't do anything about it except admire the previews of fall colors I currently see here and there among the jungly greenery. The cliff is typical geology for this area.

The Secret Pond

The Secret Pond below the cliff is accessible only when there's no greenery. Mid-April until November, briars and honeysuckle will tear your sleeves off, and maybe your face off, and the mud is like wet cookie dough and ankle-deep. Went down there today, while I still can. Beneath the cliff, although it was 60 degrees up top, I found the pondwater still frozen. See the picture for yourself. That's why I'm not hearing spring peepers yet.

Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) are very common one-inch-long "chorus frogs." Only the males sing, thousands of them, all night every night, and it sounds like "sweet sweet"; some say it sounds like jingle bells. Occupying "semi-permanent wetlands" like the approximately-one-acre Secret Pond, their music is among the earliest and therefore most thrilling signs of spring.

One night a few years ago I was listening to them with a friend and said, "I wonder what they are saying." My friend knew: "They're saying: Love me. Love me."

Waterfall #5

Waterfall #5, a drop of about 20 feet, is its most dramatic when the water's frozen, as it was today. Last in the Waterfall Photo series.

Backwoods Beachfront

You wouldn't know by looking, but this house was once a beachfront house, and it's sitting on a fortune.

Aeons ago a shallow lake covered the Midwest, and of course it had a beach. Its sand got weathered by wind, not water. The result was a vein of 99 percent pure white St. Peters silica sandstone, five miles wide, running from Minnesota down to to Missouri. My house perches right on it.

The cliff got detonated for road widening in 2002. Where it's been in the open air for some years, oxidation and water has turned the sandstone gray or red. Not far away there's a silica mine. In 50-lb. bags the old beachfront goes to make glass, chinaware, white paint, municipal water filters, and, coarse-ground, it's sold to make sand traps on golf courses. I like it just the way millions of years have left it.