life – Page 11 – In the Woods

into the mist

Last weekend we flew down to North Carolina to see the little one, and her parents, of course. 😉 A visit to the Museum of Life & Science in Durham proved to be a great adventure. The museum’s tag line is “know wonder.” We spent most of our visit at the “Into the Mist” outdoor exhibit because that’s where Katherine’s curiosity led her.

time to investigate the intermittent mist at closer range…

Activate push-button mist fields and watch as droplets of water suspended in air form clouds that hover over small valleys. How does humidity and wind impact your misty landscape? Take a one-of-a-kind stroll through this cooling landscape and watch as rainbows appear then disappear. Climb through tunnels, make sand sculptures, or just sit, cool off, and observe the beauty of mist, landforms, and rock.
~ Museum of Life & Science website

Katherine is an observer. This little amphitheater/mist pit captured her attention. For a good while she studied carefully how the other children played until the mist stopped coming up from the ground and then how one of them would run up the stairs to push a button on top of a pole to make the mist appear again.

watching another child press the button…

a new friend to play with on the sidelines…

When she finally decided to take the plunge she had a wonderful time and got thoroughly soaked in the mist.

After changing Katherine into dry clothes we all had lunch and then Grammy & Grandpa Tim got to take our little darling on the Ellerbe Creek Railway. She’s very interested in trains these days and there are a few more in the area we hope to ride on during our next visit. While on the train we passed the Hideaway Woods outdoor exhibit and will definitely have to check out the huge tree house playground. But we had all had enough excitement for one day and it was getting hotter as the day wore on. Hard to believe it was still February.

crisp winter air

red-house-and-spruces-1927 — “Red House & Spruces” by Edvard Munch

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.
~ John Burroughs
(Winter Sunshine)

~ winter solstice ~

matchless earth

autumn-jpghalfhd — “Autumn” by Winslow Homer

Oh Matchless Earth — We underrate the chance to dwell in Thee
~ Emily Dickinson
(Letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, c. 1870)

life so sweet

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate —
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1761)

indolent-ripe on the tree

9-25-16-0318 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light,
and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
~ Walt Whitman
(Sands at Seventy)

9-25-16-0325 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

hanging garden of bottle gourds

9-25-16-0372 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

As we wandered around a corn maze on a perfect autumn day, we came upon an enchanting gourd tunnel.

Gourds are natural born climbers. They seek out anything they can reach to climb closer to the sun. They grow so quickly it can become a daily task to move the vines away from some places you don’t want them to climb on. And once a tendril gets itself wound around a hold nothing short of breaking the tendril off the vine will get the little curlicue to let go. Not even the death of the vine will loosen their grip much.
~ Karen Hundt-Brown
(American Gourd Society)

9-25-16-0376 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life: in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah’s gourd.
~ Charlotte Brontë
(Villette)

9-25-16-0379 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers)

9-25-16-0381 — 9.25.16 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ Gales Ferry, Connecticut

berry picking

winslow.homer.the-berry-pickers.jpg!Large — “The Berry Pickers” by Winslow Homer

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Journal, August 23, 1853)

vitality sweeps

baby ducks with mother ~ ? ~ Mystic, Connecticut

The release of reproach enables the universal motion of vitality to flow again. Like a long-dammed-up tide, vitality sweeps toward the arid shores of the soul with compassionate moisture, bringing life into perspective and rhythm once more.
~ Caitlín Matthews
(The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year)

something more

LunaMoth800wide — luna moth by Ryan Hagerty, West Virginia

All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.
~ Eowyn Ivey
(The Snow Child)