In three more days, Fern’s Market at Serenbe will close. I have been dropping by most every day, for coffee and conversation. Somehow there are moments of puns and laughter amid the sadness. I think of Fern’s often on my Piney Woods Church Road walk. From this evening’s saunter, here are two more ferns for Fern’s.
On my way home down Piney Woods Church Road, I glimpsed this spider web along a barbed wire fence. The spider evidently used a dried plant stem as a frame, crafting its web within that spiral.
The blooms of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) are long past now, but the trees still bring beauty to my walk. In this image, a lone dogwood leaf glows in the early morning sunlight.
On the 124th day of my year-long journey, a leaf of an air potato vine (Discorya sp.) is backlit by the morning sun filtering through the trees along Piney Woods Church Road.
The leaves of a sourwood sapling glow in the late-afternoon sunlight along Piney Woods Church Road.
The late-day light swept across the cattle pasture, illuminating the white clover growing there in abundance. There is such beauty in everyday rural landscapes.
With today’s project, I reach a third of the way through a year along Piney Woods Church Road. I continue to feel immense gratitude that there is so much that is wondrous yet to discover on my journey. Lately, I have become entranced with the play of light. Late this afternoon, I set out with my wife and our four small dogs on a walk there, my expectations tempered by a mostly cloudy sky. As we walked, though, the sunlight emerged and lit the woods and pastures ablaze with yellow-gold. In this photo, the leaves of this greenbrier are glowing brightly, as if caught up in a dance of light.
Here is a series of rather experimental images from this evening, a few minutes before sunset. I am fascinated by meadow silhouettes; they remind me of my childhood experiments with Solargraphics paper. I recall placing flowers and leaves onto the paper, leaving it out in the sunlight, and creating a silhouette image as a result.
Near sunset, I took this photograph of a spider’s web constructed on a barbed-wire fence along Piney Woods Church Road. The web is filled with particles of pollen that glow in the golden late-day light.
Without intention to do so, I found myself yet again this morning photographing the play of morning sunlight and green leaves. There is so much possibility here, in the ways the early morning and late-day sun illuminate, for a brief moment, a particular leaf or plant. The light calls to me — there is so much to wonder at that I had never noticed before. In this particular moment captured in this image, a misshapen hickory (mockernut?) leaf catches the sunlight and becomes a form of beauty and delight.
