The 21st Century Matriarch

My daughter hosted lunch last week at her house. While we were waiting for it to be delivered, I bundled up and walked around her yard; I hadn’t been there since she and I handled the fall leaves back in November. The day was cold, breezy, and sunny.

I enjoyed the textures and colors of the plants left from last summer: leaves of low growing plants in a protected bed with green veins, dry flowers, plants collapsed and curled by frost.

There were seed pods from redbud (a cluster still on the tree!), maple, cones, and magnolia (alas, all the red seeds were gone from all the magnolia pods).

I found myself looking for green – noticing moss and weeds on the brick/stone walkways,

Boxwood, other evergreens along the shady path on the east side of the house, and a fresh magnolia leaf wedged in a pile of leaves from last fall.

I was very pleased that the large piles of leaf mulch my daughter and I made around some of the trees stayed in place. She’ll have less to mow around the trees next summer!

Last week we had a little snow…a few inches one afternoon and evening…enough to delay the schools opening the next morning. I took a picture as it was coming down in the afternoon before the day got too dark.

The next morning, I started before sunrise then took several pictures catching the changes in light as the sun came up and from behind the morning clouds.

The sycamore has a few leaves that caught the snow…but there were also branches acting like skewers for ribbons of snow on the tree.

The evergreens always hold a lot of snow. This time it wasn’t enough to break any limbs.

The red maple twigs already look a little red against the snow they hold.

The tulip poplar seed pods act as little cups for the snow…the branches of the tree like a candelabra. The snow was wet enough to stick to almost all the branches.

The big surprise of the morning was a hawk. When it first flew into the sycamore while I was getting my breakfast, I thought it was a mourning dove, but then decided it was a little larger…and then it turned its head and I knew it wasn’t a dove. The pictures were taken through a window with a screen but the shape of the tail is distinctive enough to indicate that it was probably a Cooper’s Hawk (rather than a sharp-shinned). No wonder there weren’t any birds around our feeder at the time!