Green Overnight

Spring green---overnight the leaves appear simultaneously. This spring morning the forest is full of green for winter starved eyes.

It's Not the Destination...

There’s a path that leads to nowhere

In a meadow that I know,

Where an inland island rises 

And the stream is still and slow;

There it wanders under willows

And beneath the silver green

Of the birches’ silent shadows

Where the early violets lean.

Other pathways lead to Somewhere,

But the one I love so well

Had no end and no beginning

Just the beauty of the dell,

Just the windflowers and the lilies

Yellow striped as adder’s tongue,

Seem to satisfy my pathway

As it winds their sweets among.

There I go to meet the Springtime,

When the meadow is aglow,

Marigolds amid the marshes,

And the stream is still and slow.

There I find my fair oasis,

And with care-free feet I tread

For the pathway leads to Nowhere,

And the blue is overhead!

All the ways that lead to Somewhere

Echo with the hurrying feet 

Of the Struggling and the Striving,

But the way I find so sweet

Bids me dream and bids me linger,

Joy and Beauty are its goal,

On the path that leads to Nowhere

I have sometimes found my soul!

The Path that Leads to Nowhere by 

Corrine Roosevelt Robinson

Snowy Woods

The winter woods are quiet and hushed and beautiful.

Fruitless Lifeless Boughs of Time

In the last spring I ever knew,

In those last days,

I sat in the forsaken orchard

Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered

The hills at Miller’s Ford;

Just to muse on the apple tree

With its ruined trunk and blasted branches,

And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms

Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle,

Never to grow in fruit.

And there was I with my spirit girded

By the flesh half dead, the senses numb,

Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth,

Such phantom blossoms palely shining

Over the lifeless boughs of Time.

O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!

Had I been only a tree to shiver

With dreams of spring and a leafy youth,

Then I had fallen in the cyclone

Which swept me out of the soul’s suspense

Where it’s neither earth nor heaven.

Edgar Lee Masters---Spoon River Anthology

Forest Mist

The January thaw has arrived and filled the forest full of mist....and mud.

Just Over the Hill

Going along a forest path--- you really don't know what's just over that hill...do you?

The Year Passes

The winds blowing in from the East Coast Hurricane stripped the leaves from all the trees as far inland as the Indiana forests. Few  leaves pictured here are still waiting to fall and we are preparing for winter as another year passes.