A Mint

Wild mint is fun to find and harvest. There's a type that's poisonous, with white flowers on tall stems, but roll a stem between your fingers, and if the stem is square -- you will feel how it's square! -- you can have free mint leaves. There are six kinds of mint in Missouri. Although this is ordinary "ground ivy" (Glechoma hederacea) it smells wonderful. I found it creekside, in the hollow of a tree stump, its tree gnawed down by beavers long ago.

 

I had made a favorite India-themed pink lentil soup, and the recipe recommends a garnish of mint leaves. In winter I do without. How lucky I am in spring to simply walk down the road, onto the path I cut, and there was my mint, presented artistically for nobody's eyes ever, unless I happened to seek it out.

Crunch Crunch

You'll never see another photo like this one: The beaver team down on the LaBarque thought they'd fell this mature creekside oak -- which would have been the largest timber in their dam -- but then changed their minds, apparently. Wonder why? Their jaws got tired? Too much chance it would fall the wrong way and create a fatality? Too tall to guide down their mud chute into the creek? They've simply abandoned this particular tree.