The wood oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) whose tawny dry stalks I had photographed in January have re-emerged from the ground with broad green blades and seeds just beginning to develop. Along a roadside rich in European “weeds”, wood oats are native to the Southeast, produce edible seeds, and have even been cultivated as a grain.
A lone blackberry leaf catches the late afternoon light. I am entranced.
On a sunny late-spring morning after a rain, I pause to celebrate the simple forms and colors of leaves and sky.
On a cloudy early morning in late spring, a few English Plantain flowers bloom in a Piney Woods Church Road pasture.
An hour or so before sunset along Piney Woods Church Road, I took this photograph of clouds illumined by the late-day sunlight, with a loblolly pine tree in the foreground. How I wish the clouds would bring us some rain!
We have now gone a couple of weeks without measurable rainfall, and folks are beginning to get uneasy. Are we headed into another drought? Meanwhile, dust covers everything along Piney Woods Church Road — dust that settles in clouds in the wake of each passing car or truck. There is a sugary coating on the leaves of the roadside shrubs and saplings. There is no water left anywhere — ditches, ruts, and potholes have long been dry. For a photographer in a hurry, the road offers few opportunities. Given only fifteen minutes — my situation today — I had only two viable choices: daisies or spiders. The daisy fleabane continues to bloom, propelled to continue by a sort of biological inertia, when most all other roadside weeds and trees are spent — at least, until the next rains come. Pollinating bees and flies flock to the daisies, and some likely fall victim to the orchard orbweaver spiders that have set up shop at numerous locations along the roadway. Their webs are elegant, among the finest instances of nature’s geometry. For today, I settled for another spider image, this time a photograph depicting the spider as a sort of Master Controller at the center of its web, working the machinery of its own predatory impulses. Tomorrow? Maybe daisies again. Or perhaps a sunset, red sky intensified by dust in the atmosphere. If only it would rain….
My leg having improved considerably since yesterday, today I was able to park near the Rico Rd. intersection and hobble my way up Piney Woods Church Road about a third of the distance and back again. I passed some minute yellow flowers, perhaps an eighth of an inch across, and took a few photographs. But the find of the day was definitely this robber fly or assassin fly, in the family Asilidae (very possibly Promachus fitchii), feasting on a small moth. Robber flies are aggressive predators that pierce their prey with a proboscis, delivering a blend of neurotoxic and digestive enzymes that paralyze their victims and dissolve tissues and internal organs, which they then ingest as if through a straw.
Today was, without doubt, the most difficult day I have experienced in my photo-odyssey thus far. A couple of pulled muscles and tendons in my left leg required me to drive to Piney Woods Church Road yesterday, hobbling my way along only half the distance of the road. Today, the leg had worsened considerably, to the point that I could put practically no weight onto it at all. For a few minutes, I actually considered the prospect of abandoning the enterprise. Just getting from my office to the back door of the house was a frustration; getting across the yard and driveway to the car took several minutes. I arrived at the car, lifted my leg by the sock top to place it in the car (it is too weak to lift without support), and realized I had forgotten my car key. Fortunately, the cell phone was in the car, so I was able to call my wife in the house (easily the shortest-distance call I have ever made) and ask her to bring it to me. I abandoned all thought of getting out of the car and attempting a brief roadside hobble; I settled instead for taking photographs out the open window of the Prius. Fortunately, a neighbor provided a ready-made subject for the camera — a new horse fence along the roadway, completed just this past week. Here’s hoping I will be back up to at least a few minutes of groundwork by tomorrow afternoon.
I hobbled my way down Piney Woods Church Road today, having pulled a muscle in my leg a couple of days ago and managed to pull it a second time for good measure earlier this morning. I was restricted to what I could see at eye level (sitting down being out of the question), and I only traveled part of the road, from Rico Road to the (dry) drainage ditch at about the halfway point. I found more spiders and other insects. I also noticed the brilliant red of new growth from a roadside red maple sapling (Acer rubrum). We tend to think of new growth as happening in early spring, but many trees continue to put forth new leaves well into the summertime.
In this humble photograph, a lone tree catkin dangles from a barbed wire fence by silken threads. It is Day 150, and there is so much more of the commonplace yet to be encountered — things like this catkin that I continue to pass over every day, until one day I will glimpse them, as if for the first time.
