Home Again

As if home was actually a space or a single place or a feeling...... Anyway, the kaliedoscope girl is back from India and Blue and I are back on the farm. I can never come back here without a period of nesting. First, we go for a brief walk to check out the greenhouses and fields, fill the birdfeeders, and make sure the bonsai are happy. Then Blue won't let me alone until we go for a walk down in the woods. She will follow me around with her nose to my left thigh until I give up and point toward the driveway. Then she's off! We have a couple familiar routes we take and this time we walked down the road and around the pasture. There's a path cut through the neighbor's woods that we follow to a fork which goes either down along a ridge or winds back up to the other side of the neighbor's house. We used to explore along the fence lines and down to the pond and the creek, but when I have other things to do, we just walk to the end of the lower fork and then back. We've cut a small openning in the fence to our field so that instead of following the road, we can cut through and up the hill to our shed. Sometimes we detour over behind the blackberry hedge to where the deer sleep. The early morning air was filled with a really thick mist. It reminded me of the Mount. Mount St. Joseph on the Ohio where I went to college. The road between the motherhouse and the classroom buildings would be tumbling with mist in the mornings. That mist would remind me of English moors like in Jane Eire or Wuthering Heights. This mist is just farm mist that you know will burn off soon, so it feels more welcoming. And it's luscious to inhale.
While we were away the spiders at the farm must have been decorating for Halloween! It's so impressive that I left their webs alone for now.
The final phase of my nesting in is to go to Ridgefield Refuge that is about 2 miles from here if you take the back roads. We left here around noon which is usually when all the wildlife is hidden away napping or something. It was gray and spitting sprinkles, and I guess the birds like that - their were so many different kinds of birds out! The Refuge is a wetlands area with a 4.2 mile road winding through it. Sometimes it doesn't look too wet except for one boggy area, one long lake, and two riverlets. But today it looked soaked. Lots of standing water. Lots of flocks migrating, crisscrossing everywhich way across the sky. There are always blue heron and still a few white egrets. Several kinds of hawks. Wish I could tell them apart. There must have been over a hundred swans on the lake. I'm not sure whether they are trumpeter or tundra swans. They're the ones with black beaks and black legs. And several muskrats or river otters - one a mom with two pups.
A cup of coffee from Giovanie's Pizza, and then my nesting is complete. Now I'm officially back!