Return of the Peepers

I have made my way down to Dean's Fork, tracking animals all the way. As I hit the dirt road I hear from upstream an enormous chorus of spring peepers, so many that I can hardly believe my ears. So instead of turning downstream, as I have for the last six months, I head up.





I head toward the beaver pond, which had all but dried up when I saw it last fall.



And what a sight met my

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Animal Tracking School

Please pardon the interruption in the Dean's Fork story. There's this thing called spring ephemerals, and in order to be of most use to my readers, I decided to publish the ephemerals posts while they were blooming in southeast Ohio. I knew you wouldn't mind.



We've now made it through another winter, and it's early spring 2017. I hadn't been up to the beaver pond since late September

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Travels with DOD: The Abandoned House

Curiosity is my constant companion. Must give credit where credit is due: Both my mother, Ida, and father Dale were curious people. Ida kept a Webster's Unabridged about ten feet from the kitchen sink so she could look up a word she wondered about. She had a terrific vocabulary and was a voracious reader (these things tend to go hand in hand). My dad, too, read stacks of books, with history,

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Honoring DOD: Spring Ephemerals Day

It always amazes me how many of my friends remember the day in 1994 the world lost the wise, wry light that was my Dear Old Dad (DOD, as he signed his typewritten letters).



With my newfound certainty that I'm accompanied in this life, I was delighted to find the weather report for April 10 was, in a word, ravishing. High of 79, abundant sunshine. Just the thing to make the spring ephemeral

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Animal Magic on Dean's Fork

By July 13, 2016, the Canada lilies I'd never known were there burst into bloom on the banks of the pond. Blue campanula set them off nicely. I left a note on the door of the sometime inhabitants of the little solar-powered cabin nearby, to go look for these ephemeral floral treats. I like doing stuff like that, shining a little light into the woods for others to see.











Wild bergamot

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Hidden Miracles on Dean's Fork: Spring 2016

I never tire of shooting this girl and this place.



All through the winter of 2015-2016, the pond held in there, tiny but present. Spring 2016 came. Chet and I took a long Dean's walk with Phoebe on a freakishly warm March day during her spring break from Bowdoin. We were practically bare, and reveling in early spring beauties, already abloom.




Abundant, lush summer 2016 came on, and

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Back to the Beaver Pond

I didn't go back to what had been the beaver pond for a year. I couldn't bear it. One more happy place had been ripped out from under me.

My first trip back to Dean's Fork was March 15, 2015, but I stayed away from the pond. I took to walking the lower half, not wanting to know about the languishing, the drying up going on upstream.

The summer of 2015 wore on, and I stayed on the lower part of

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What Happened Next

I have been putting off writing this post. Know before you read it that it gets bad, and then it gets better. I always bring you back, don't I?



I hope you'll go on this walk with me. I have to write about this now, even though it's really hard for me.



September 25, 2014. I knew that was the date. It was the weirdest thing. I plugged in my external hard drive just now and zeroed in on the

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