When I pulled this picture out from the stack I thought of where it was and then chuckled.
I was looking at a Green Turn. There is a Green Heron, a Great Blue, and a Yellow Warbler, but there is no Green Tern. Although I know a pond not far from this picture of Chinn Ridge where in Summer I can see a Green Heron fly over. He is as much russet and brown as green. He is an exciting bird, although not as big as the Great Blue Heron.
Here on Chinn Ridge, at the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the path takes a decided turn.
The path goes in straight stretches through low lying areas along the top of the ridge There are Paw-Paw trees (Asimina triloba) to be found in the area of scrub trees, their roots climbing over exposed stone. But as the path slopes gently upward toward a high point on it crest, the understory clears and the large, more magnificent trees reach upward. The Oaks and Tulip Poplars compete as they reach for the sun and their leaves form a shady canopy high over the path.
This picture was taken on a calm, grey Spring day as the trees were first leafing against the sky. Today , in mid-September, the sun streams out of the cloudless sky but underneath as I walk the turn in the path I am shaded by the thick green canopy high overhead. Today is the hottest day of the year. The temperature is 97degrees, and the humidity pushes it higher.
It will only be a short walk today. I may reach this half-mile point in the woods or I might turn back before then. But if I reach this green turn, I know I will feel that I am in a familiar place. I have walked out of the ordinary into a place that is super-ordinary. When I look into the woods, it is open, but in the distance as the ridge falls away it is dark. The leaves move in the slight breeze, and I can see shapes far below me. They move among the trunks of the younger hardwoods, but they seem to stop and linger behind the trunks of the older giants. I know from other walks that where the bottom stream flows there are Sycamores, and the Sun’s reflection is glaring off the stream as it ripples and flows into the far woods and towards the Bay and on down to the ocean.
The water that the stream carries has flowed in and around the roots of the Oak and the Poplar and the Ash and past the Paw-Paw and down beyond the Sycamores.
Soon in the Fall the Paw-Paw ‘apples’ will be mottled and ripe, and I will take one, and say thank you, and turn back to a more real but less green world.