first snow, fat flakes

first snow, fat wet flakes

falling on the square through flags

honoring veterans

Always, it's moving to see hundreds of American flags standing at attention in rows all around the town square. They appear like magic on national holidays -- Veteran's Day and Independence Day. This year on the 11th day of November the flags really are moving, blown about by a wind bringing the first snow of winter. Two young women and a toddler, sensibly dressed in parkas, are strolling along the flag-bordered walks. They are greeted with wide arms by a man not so sensibly dressed -- shorts, no socks, no hat -- but their effusive group hug is enough to warm everyone.

rain wet window holds

rain wet window holds

red maple leaves, reflection

of a bare black tree

Cold autumn rain, the kind that makes you hurry to get home. As I rush along the rain-slick street, a mile-long coal train trundling east blocks my way. Without slowing down, I detour to the railroad underpass, then turn back on a different street. What does stop me is a white van, festooned with orange and yellow maple leaves. It's not blocking my way, but I pull over anyway, to stare at the spectacle of the fallen leaves, arrested in their descent by the same rain that blew them down. From the dark side window, the reflection of a "boo tree" stares back at me, its bare black limbs reaching out as if to recapture its bright treasures.
          Without the coal train I would not have taken a different route home. Without the rain the autumn leaves would have simply fallen to the ground. And without a sense of wonder I would not have stopped to marvel at the beauty of dead leaves and be surprised by a dark reflection.

on the night of the dead

on the night of the dead

a red-eyed ghoul with gaping mouth

on a white pumpkin

At the end of September, suddenly the supermarkets are full of pumpkins lined up in rows outside. I search the stands for the most unusual pumpkins, passing up the traditional orange pumpkins, varying only in size and girth, as well as the green ones and those covered with warts. Finally, I choose a a small white one with a lovely curved stem and a black ghoulish face on one side where it lay on the ground, a blemish with character. And also a low, wide red pumpkin with a yellow and green cape on the top.

          These two will not become Jack-o-lanterns, destined to rot and be thrown into the garbage after Halloween. Instead, after serving as table decor for a month, I carve them into slices for drying, to be added to soups and stews all winter long. The big one goes first. Sliced in half and resting upside down, it looks like the face of an owl with two big eyes and a beak. I scoop out the pulp and extract the seeds, saving a few for planting and roasting the rest for snacks. Then I slice up the thick orange flesh and arrange the pieces on a bamboo tray for drying. When the slices are dry, this gigantic pumpkin fits inside a quart jar, where another face with a long nose gazes back at me.

          We who have faces see faces everywhere. The first thing human babies focus their eyes on is their mother's face, with obvious survival benefits. But why we see faces in clouds, tree bark, stones, buildings with windows and doors, car hoods, clocks, and pumpkins is amusing, isn't it?

woolly bear -- black hair

woolly bear -- black hair

curled in a ball under a log

waiting for winter

Isabella usually goes with the black and orange look for Halloween, but this year she dyed her spiky hair all black. I found her curled up under a log, taking a nap.
          Isabella is a woolly bear caterpillar, and she's not the only one to change her costume. Every single one of the woolly bears I've seen crossing the highway in search of a hidey-hole for the winter have all-black bristles. In all my years of watching woolly bears, I've never seen anything like it. What does it mean? 
          The woolly bear, which is neither a bear nor woolly, is the bristly larva of the Isabella tiger moth. The caterpillar has 13 segments, normally orange-brown in the middle and black on both ends. According to legend, the wider the brown band, the milder the coming winter, so no brown at all would predict a really hard winter. But is it true?
          According to Mike Peters, an entomologist at the University of Massachusetts, the number of brown hairs indicates the age of the caterpillar, reflecting how late it emerged in the spring. A heavy winter or an early spring the previous year would result in a wider brown band. If that's true, then we should have had a harsh winter last year, but actually it was fairly warm with little snow, unlike most winters in Iowa. 
          So who knows, maybe the woolly bears just wanted a new look this year.

eye of the buck

   

 

eye of the buck

opening slowly from inside

its prickly pod

When I was growing up, we lived for some years in Ohio, the Buckeye State. The lawn behind our house sloped down to a woods that bordered old railroad tracks. A short walk down the tracks was the "bum's house," an abandoned concrete shell with empty windows, the walls covered with graffiti, and on the floor a blackened spot from cooking fires.
          We had our own fire pit in our little parcel of the woods, surrounded by logs for sitting around the fire at night, watching the orange sparks fly up from the flames to join the stars peaking through the tree canopy, roasting marshmallows for s'mores and telling tall tales. Sometimes we threw buckeyes in the fire, daring each other to eat the roasted nuts. We saw squirrels eating the raw nuts, but they knew how to chew through the pink outer layer, which is very bitter, to the white inner heart. Once, I tried doing what I heard that the Native Americans did, roasting, mashing and grinding the seeds into a meal which for porridge, but it was not very satisfying.
          During the afternoons and on weekends we ran around in our woods playing games. One of our favorites involved buckeyes. The equipment was simple, but took some time to construct. In early autumn, when the buckeye trees dropped their seed pods, the greenish-gold, leathery husks would split open, revealing one or sometimes two glossy, chestnut brown seeds with a pale circular "eye" that looks like the eye of a buck. Everyone carried a favorite buckeye for good luck, and just for the marvelous feel of the smooth orb. But for this game you searched for the biggest buckeye you could find, through which you drilled a hole and tied one end of a long string through the hole.
          The game consisted of two kids bashing their buckeyes together with the goal of breaking the other buckeye. If you did, you got to add that "coup" to your buckeye. If you broke a buckeye that already had a total coup of seven, then you got to add seven strikes to your buckeye. It took a good deal of mind-body coordination to get two flying objects to connect, and we learned from experience about momentum, velocity, vectors and what happens when two bodies collide. Sometimes the collision involved the other person's arm or hand, but that strike didn't count and could result in your friend holding a strike against you, which was another kind of lesson.
          I still like to collect buckeyes in the fall, but now I leave them in their shells and put them in a bowl on the dining table so I can watch the spiny husks slowly open like eyelids, revealing shiny dark brown eyes.

no longer hidden

no longer hidden

by leaves, spiny buckeye pods,

a paper wasp nest

On my way home from the mailbox at the highway, I stop to pick up some buckeye pods fallen on the gravel road. Only a scattering of russet five-fingered leaves and spiny pods remain on the nearly naked tree. Looking up, I spot a large gray object the size and shape of a head, hanging from a lower branch. It's a paper hornet nest. Just as I'm wondering if it's abandoned, I see hornets streaming in and out of a hole near the bottom of the nest. Through my zoom lens I can see the white face and the three white stripes on the tail that identifies them as bald-faced hornets, also called white-faced or white-tailed hornets. These are very aggressive insects, which will sting repeatedly if their nest is disturbed. A little scary, realizing how I've been traipsing for months past this nest, hidden by leaves not so very far above my head. I've already suffered an incredibly painful sting on the sole of my foot when I inadvertently stepped on a hornet this summer. Good thing I didn't try shaking the tree to knock down the buckeyes.

before falling

before falling

locust pods transform, half light,

half curvaceous dark 

While everyone else rushes to lunch, I stand transfixed under the honey locust. It's not the feathery green leaves that capture my attention, although they are quite lovely. Rather it is the long, flat seed pods, curving and curling around each other in clusters. The long legumes are beginning to turn from gold to dark brown, creating fabulous patterns akin to the spots on wild animals. Brown lobes swelling up along the edge of the pod look like fingers or teeth. The thick pods encapsulate shiny brown seeds, the bearers of potential new life. And how marvelous, in the process of dying, the pods produce such graceful curves, this beautiful contrast of dark and light.

          This particular tree, growing in town, is a thornless honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos inermis. Out where we live in the countryside, the woods are full of the more common thorny variety. Bees are attracted to the clusters of sweet creamy blossoms, but the name of the tree actually derives from the sweet inner pulp of the unripe pods, which Native Americans used for food. Our white-tailed deer love to forage on the sweet pods, passing on and thus dispersing the undigested seeds. On the other hand, I have seen squirrels chew open the leathery brown pods and with their hard teeth consume the hard seeds.