Looking for Morels, Which We Didn't Find

Oh, the things you find when you go into the woods.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

We found other things.
A whole new patch of pawpaws in a place I hadn't looked


Dangling bloody blossoms, calling flies to tickle and play



So that from this strange bell a fruit will form



Banana custard, pulp and seeds in a soft yellow skin.

We'll come back in September.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

I stopped on a hillside to watch a cardinal build her nest

Followed her to a honeysuckle tangle
And there found a butterfly
never before seen on our land

The round rings on its wings rang a distant bell.
And there in the woods I combed the books of memory
Found the answer waiting, struggling up through the pages and the hard cover of time



A Harvester! Fenisecus tarquinius
Only the second seen in a life of looking for butterflies
And here! on our land, not one but two.


Its caterpillar, the only predaceous one, spurning leaves for aphids.

Number 73 for the property.

But I digress. Numbers are not poetry.

Walking a little farther along, the first turtle of spring
Frozen, watchful



I pretended not to see him. He never pulled in his head.
A victory, however small.

And farther along the same slope
I stop, become still
A crunch of leaves, almost inaudible
I focus like an owl on a spot yards away



Where the second turtle of spring
has drawn in its foot

That sound enough to betray its presence.



Its eye an angry garnet
Discovered but resolute.



Looking for morels, which we didn't find.



Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company--Wikipedia

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

Harvester, Fenisecus tarquinus, #73 for Indigo Hill, Whipple, Ohio, April 26, 2009

Duck Creek Idyll

It is that time of year, when the evenings are so fleeting and yet so lovely that it hurts. Why didn't I use the long summer evenings better? Why do these have to end so soon? We hurry down to Duck Creek for a wade before the light is all gone.

On the way, a creeper-strangled silo glows in the dying sunlight. How can it be this beautiful here, where we get to live? I want to roll in the sidelit grass.

On the path to the stream, a pawpaw hangs, still green and hard as a rock, giving no hint to the mushy tropical sweetness it soon will achieve. There is a small bowl brimming with pawpaws on my windowsill, and this morning in the dark of a power outage I smelled them ripening. Ahh. Soon I will bite into my first wild-gathered pawpaw.
Lower down in the tree, a pawpaw sphinx, Dolba hyloeus, eats, a pthalo blue spur springing from his hind end. He's done a number on that pawpaw leaf. That's his job. This is Joe Garris' photo of an adult, lifted from a wonderful silkmoth site.

It reminds me of a tabby cat.

Great lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica (so called because it was thought to cure the clap) glows at pathside.
We bring our friend Oona along, and she wades in to have a better look at a colony of whirligig beetles scudding madly on the water's surface.
The dwindling light renders her a Renoir painting. "Mommy all wet, Daddy all wet, Oona all wet," she says, flapping her hands. When and how did she learn to talk? It seems like yesterday she was getting her face washed by Chet, who was afraid she'd fall off the sofa.
Liam skips stones.
Why don't we just go wade in streams? There are so many things to be discovered.