January 28, 2012 The Cottonwood Trail

I took my dog, Boofa, to the Cottonwood Trail, parking off Woodburn where I can usually let him run loose through the frisbie golf field. It is a bright blue day, cool with small cumulous clouds. We pass a small pond now full to the brim after last week's rains.  Often there is a great blue heron standing there, but not today.  Spring is coming early this year. A crab apple blooms near the woods. As we come closer to the wetlands, I can hear the frogs singing furiously.  They usually begin to sing in mid or late February.  Today they are singing  "how I  love you, my oh my...
river deep and mountain high". We walk the boardwalk over the wetlands where beavers have built dams of sticks and mud in a huge circle enclosing the water.  In the summer we saw a black snake as fat as a bicycle tire there.  There is scat full of seeds from an animal on the boardwalk. We take the circular highlands trail and then over to the ridge along Lawson's Fork Creek. Then we walk the length of the trail beside the creek.  A man with nasal canula oxygen is on the trail with his dog, Little Bit.  She looks like a Carolina Dog.  He says she's just a dog.
There are tags on some of the trees along the way:  Water Oak, Red Mulberry, Carolina Silverbell, Green Ash, River Birch, Cottonwood and Gum.

A sign alerts the presence of invasive plant species:  English Privet, English Ivy and Japanese Honeysuckle and in fact, the ivy and previt are everywhere here. We pass under two bridges.
The grafitti says: Jerem hearts Anna.

Back in the parking lot, a man beside a blue pickup truck shows me photos he has taken of mink,
a large copperhead and a beautiful owl.  He says you have to come here at twilight, the magic hour, and wait quietly to see them.

It is twilight now. There is an orange neon sunset with light purple stratus clouds fringed in gold.
Boofa howls to the music playing on the car radio.

Now we are home and  I can hear the frogs singing in the wetlands beyond the woods behind my house.  I am walking four or five miles now. Before my surgery  in the fall, I could walk only three miles.  My doctor says I can increase the distance every month.  He suggested I carry a back pack later.  His son trained to walk the Appalachian Trail by carrying a backpack with 60 lbs of rocks inside.

Not for Sissies, January 25, 2012

"I find my journal brimful of enthusiam.  Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands, shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the Cloak of Many Cares and the Slavery of Home, one feels once more happy.  The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood...a journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope, the three sister Graces of our moral being."
- Richard F. Burton, Zanzibar.

I plan to walk for all of these reasons: for Imagination, Memory and Hope, to follow short trails near home and then as my endurance increases, longer trails farther away.

This is a blog about walking and what I find along the way.