Thursday, December 1, 2011

November 15, 16, and 30

Up until November 15, we had weather that wasn't much different from the latter part of October.  The morning temperatures might be in the thirties in the morning but by afternoon, the temperatures would be in the fifties and sixties.  This is a time of year when I am glad we are in southern Ohio rather than northern Ohio where the temperatures would be five to ten degrees cooler.

But even though the temperature was in the fifties and there was no breeze so walking at Charleston Falls on November 15 was pleasant, I knew I was walking on a November day.

This photo was taken about three in the afternoon.  To get the exact sky, the camera shows the grass as much duller than it actually was.

The bright green of the trail and the ominous sky mean November to me.  I wasn't especially pleased to see the sprinkle of red along the tree line.  The red comes from bush honeysuckle, an invasive species which holds its leaves long after the native plants are gone.  The birds eat the berries and spread the plant everywhere.



But I did enjoy listening to the falls.  All three were flowing, the two that always flow and the intermittent falls which flows only when we have had unusual amounts of rain.

We'd  had so much rain that the Great Miami River was spreading over its floodplain again.


I walked the following day, too.  It was a bright and sunny day.  There was a lovely sky.  The park staff was leading a group of children on a tour of the special rocks of our part of Ohio and teaching the importance of all rocks.  The children had never thought of aluminum cans as coming from rock or of rocks being important in the manufacture of their techie toys like cell phones and computers.  And of course, they talked about salt as being a rock.  As they hiked back to the buses in the parking lot, they stopped at a jumbled group of erratics brought by the glaciers of long ago.  Each child climbed on one and jumped off, shouting, "Thank you, rocks."


Officially, for me, winter arrived on November 30.  We had our first significant snow.


But, by afternoon, it had melted away.






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