As of this writing, the number of “visits” to this little’pile has reached 12,176. Thanks to everyone who has come by, you from all parts of the planet, you from a hundred different countries.
I’ve gone up and down Music Street many thousands of times. Here are two little investigations from a walk to The Store (Alley’s) to get The Mail.
Passing the Maley’s, their big bamboo grove is now torn and ragged along road’s edge. A recent snow laid hundreds of stalks into the traveled way. In order to clear the road, the Town highway department chopped off the stems off and shoved them into an open spot nearby.
It’s always worth a moment to step into this field of grass.
First you look up.
Step inside the grove and instantly, what you hear is different. The open sounds of the street, with distant noise of crawling car and cawing crow, change to near, enclosed and cloistered sound. Leaves rustle, stems clack, footsteps crunch, on leaf and snow.
Then you look in. Someone had been there before me. Someone with small feet. Their footprints wove in arcs and loops throughout the bamboo. That little someone was small enough to not be impeded by the closeness of the stems. Compared to them, my passage was inelegant.
Passing through these stems is our rural equivalent of pressing through a crowded subway car. Except you don’t feel obligated to say “excuse me” as you navigate the stalks.
Further in, an industrial shape lurks like a turtle.
Inside the bamboo, an ancient combine slowly returns to the soil. Thousands of people pass by this grove every year, and never notice the presence of this relic.
The machine, once a snipper of stems and saver of seeds, stays inside the grove. It cuts no more, and saves only what falls upon it.
Does the old machine sink into the earth or does the earth rise up to swallow it?
We leave the grove.
Farther along, across from the Block/Athearn property line, at the corner of Gertrude Turner’s old field, brush grows. Honeysuckle has gotten established from underneath, and now covers the brush. Honeysuckle does not grow as quickly as southern kudzu, but it is persistent. Over, under, around, and through, the vine weaves a twisted tangle .
The supporting bush is no longer visible. Snow covers the honeysuckle that covers the bush that covers what once was the grass of the corner of Gertrude Turner’s field. She would not have approved. She knew what branches and bushes can do, along edges. Every year, they steal more field. You must cut them down, and stop them.
Inside, under snow and leaf, even in daylight, even on a windy day, it is still and dark.
Anyone home?
A hole in the snow frames leaves and twisted stems.
There’s no loss without gain. These snow-behatted, viny tangles are shelter for many a small bird. On a bitter cold and windy night, a resting place like this is a very tolerable place to sleep. Particularly when staying in an exposed location would be fatal.
A frozen leading stem waits warmer weather.
Snowy patches make reverse silhouettes against the dark interior.
Is it a ghost or a planarian?
I say it is a pig nose since I saw the movie “beasts of the southern wild” yesterday
It looks like the head of a planarian to me, straight out of Look’s Pond……
I haven’t been walking along Music Street for a good while, and I know that stretch of bamboo well. I had wondered what, if anything, lurked within, or might every disrupt it. I assume it will be back, full-bore, in no time. But thanks for the reveal. And thanks for that last pic. It’s also been a good long while since I have pondered planaria.
Lizzy wrote exactly what I was thinking. (I had just seen Beats of the Southern Wild too).
*Beasts