It never ceases to amaze me that whenever I go into the woods just below our house, I invariably see something I’ve never noticed before.  And this morning was no exception.

      After strolling down the hill into the forest, I took a seat on a spread of dead oak leaves.   Then I proceeded to take in what could be seen from this particular vantage point.    Lots of tall chestnut oaks, some hickories and tupelo.  There were smaller red maples, slender and leaning in one direction or another.  Some moosewood, a few as tall as the maples, others no taller than a shrub.  And here and there a little ’tree sprout,’ no more than a foot high and sporting just a few leaves.  And there was no shortage of fallen branches strewn about, resting at various angles and some partially covered in a year or two’s worth of dead leaves.

     As I sat looking, I began to take in more.  A large ant on a mission, determinedly carrying some little white sphere uphill and down through the leaves.  The cicadas, I noticed, were almost silent, after having made quite a din yesterday.  Only a couple of birds were singing.  A woodpecker tapped for a few moments. 

     And, perhaps most dramatic of all, the sun cast streaks of light through the trees–onto a patch of forest floor, onto leaves fluttering from certain trees, onto a few tree trunks.

     Then my eye caught something I don’t remember having seen before. 

     About 30 feet away, on the trunk of a hickory tree lit by the morning sun, was a very large shadow of a leaf.  The shadow came from one of the few chestnut oak leaves that hung on a spindly tree between the sun and the hickory.  Of course I had to capture the tree with its leaf shadow on film (if one can refer to digital photography as film!).  Moving nearer to the tree to take my picture, I noticed, on a pine tree farther on, a much more pleasing, even delightful shadow.  There on the reddish pine bark danced several small leaf shadows.  As the breeze rustled the living leaves on a nearby red maple, their shadows moved gracefully in the sunshine against their scaly pine bark background.  The sight gave me joy, and I eagerly snapped a couple of pictures.

     Feeling very happy as I hiked back up the hill to the house, I paused to observe a daddy long legs ambling along nearby.  It too paused, and with a couple of its legs, sensitively investigated my shoe.  Then the daddy long legs moved on.  I watched as its small body, suspended among many long, arched legs, cast a little oblong shadow that followed along on the ground.–April Moore

maple leaf shadows dancing on a pine tree in the sunshine

 

an oak leaf shadow on the trunk of a hickory tree

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.