A Short Trip

Under a serene New York sky some of the first leaves to start turning colors this fall are on this young maple.  They are on a hedgerow next to a field of mature corn.  Yes, that’s the field of corn that stands between my property and my access to my neighbor’s beaver pond area.

And the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye (from the musical Oklahoma, the song is Oh What A Beautiful Morning).  Apparently the eye of an elephant is somewhere about ten feet above the ground.  Of course, it may depend upon the particular elephant, and whether it was born in India or Africa..

Next I stumbled upon this structure on a dead birch tree.  I can’t be sure, but I believe this is the roof for a woods gnome to live under (at least when it rains).  It’s hard to tell with my photography skills, or lack of same, but it is about four inches in diameter.

These small berries are on the top of a bush about five feet in height.  I’ve no idea what their real name is, but as a child I learned to call them snake berries, so to me that is what they are.  To anyone else, I don’t know.

I know what these are.  They’re milk weeds.  When a child growing up on a dairy farm my brothers and I picked these and they became our cows on our play farms.  We lined them all up in our pretend barn, and tended them for hours at a time.  We also picked them during WWII and saved them for the military.  As I recall it was 1944 and their insides were used in life preservers, but I may be wrong.

A little later in my journey I found these turning leaves.  They are on some sort of a small shrub that soon will be barren of their presence as our winter comes calling.  I hope you enjoyed our fanciful trip around the eight acres or so where we traveled.