A Walk in our Early Winter Neighborhood

I took a walk around our neighborhood this past week to try out my new ski bibs; I’d purchased them when we got home from New Mexico where my legs got very cold on some of our early mornings and I wanted to see that they worked before our next trek up to Conwingo to see the Bald Eagles. They – along with my long standing cold weather gear – kept be very comfortable even though the temperature on the day of my walk was in the 20s. They were very comfortable for walking/hiking too.

The neighborhood was so full of color just a few weeks ago – the memory of its brilliance still so fresh – that if found myself searching for anything that was drab winter colors. There were Christmas decoration, of course, but I was more interested in seeing color in the vegetation. I found a stand of Callery Pear saplings (i.e. escaped Bradford Pears) in an area that is not mowed behind the water retention pond. They were catching the morning sun and were brilliantly orange. I admired them even knowing that I shouldn’t like them because they are invasive and will crowd out plants we may need (in prior years this area was the best place to find milkweed in the neighborhood and the Monarch butterflies need that to survive).

The pond itself is typical of many in our area. The maintenance crews mow the slopes very short and they erode. In the case of our pond, the grass if very thin in some areas and there are beginning to be bare spots where there is no vegetation at all. Some moles or ground hogs or chipmunks have made tunnels on some parts of the slope and several have collapsed. There are cat tails and a willow at the edge of the pond. It seemed like both were a little further out of the water than I remembered. The pond is filling in.

The cattails did not offer any color relief but I like the texture of the ‘tails’ – the brown velvet and lighter color of the fluffy seeds.

As I walked back through the neighborhood, I realized that the distance seemed shorter than it usually does so I must have been very comfortable in my winter walking gear!