Back Trails and Buttons

 On Friday, I strapped up my toe, my ankle, and leaving my knee to fend for itself, set off for a short hike. Up on the Skyline Drive, it was quiet and cold. There were few people about, even the lookouts were empty of visitors, a shame,  as the views were magnificent.

I spotted a grassy lay by, with a trail heading up onto the mountain, so parked up, grabbed my backpack and poles, and began walking. The air was crisp and quiet. I heard a couple of cars pass on the road behind me, but as I climbed, the traffic sounds faded away, and silence surrounded me. At the top of the trail, a marker told me I was now on the Appalachian Trail, and could go left or right. I went left, stopping to admire the spectacular vistas.

I was now walking along the top of the mountain, where the trees are short and stubby, due to them being exposed to the elements, including heavy winds. But today, there was no wind, just fresh, chilly air punctuated occasionally with a few crow cries and the angry chatter of squirrels having their peace and quiet disturbed by a human. Yet, despite dealing with adverse conditions, nature is thriving up here. Bright green lichens cover the trees and rocks, with glorious clumps of emerald mosses. Shelf fungi clung to fallen trunks and the autumn leaves shimmered on the ground in the winter sunshine. I looked for lions mane mushrooms, a fluffy, tendriled mushroom, on the trees, but there were none of their host trees up here on the exposed ridge line.

I walked 2 miles along the AT, the trail descending down the side of the mountain, crossing the Skyline Drive, and then climbing back up again, then down and up some more before I decided to stop. I sat on some huge rocks to drink water, and chewed a Cliff bar with an expiration date of September 2022. It didn’t taste any different from what I remembered, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I gave myself a scare while I sat munching, as ahead of me, among the bare tree trunks, I saw a large black shape, and thought it was a bear that had got a whiff of my peanut bar. But after some scrutinizing and moving from side to side, I realized it was an uprooted tree, its bare root base facing me with black earth still clinging and hanging in clods. I hurriedly finished my snack and began the walk back.

Along a more sheltered part of the trail, there were large clumps of mountain laurel, their dark green, shiny leaves encroaching over the trail, beginning to form a tunnel. This will be a pretty spot in early spring when their white and pink flowers bloom. On the way up, I had noticed the path was covered with acorns. Called a mast year, when trees put out a bigger crop of seeds than usual, this is also a sign of a severe winter approaching, according to folklore and the Farmer’s Almanac. On the way back I stopped and picked up several handfuls, stuffing them in my backpack, for the squirrels and blue jays at home.

Heading home, I stopped at one of the lookouts, the Blue Ridge Mountains looking somber under the heavy winter sky. I felt a few drops of rain, and was glad to be warm and dry in Stanley as I drove back to The Blue House..

I had decided to get crafty on Thursday evening. I have a rose colored lampshade on a vintage lamp stand, given to me by friends many years ago. I used to like the lampshade, but have discovered it’s one commonly seen, so now I dislike it, as I prefer to be different. I pulled off the fabric, and decided to create something original.

Over 30 years ago, I bought an old gramophone cabinet, which, inside, had some old sewing bits and pieces, scissors, fabric tape measure, wooden reels of cotton, needle cases, other odds and ends, including a tub of vintage buttons. Moving from England, I parted with the cabinet, but kept the contents, as I was using them, and the buttons went into some ancient Balls canning jars for decoration. I tipped them out onto the dining room table, and with wire, started to recover the lampshade frame with old buttons.

It was going well, but after a while, my fingers were getting sore from the tugging and pulling on the wire. I did some more after my hike, and then finished it on Saturday morning. I had worried that I would run out of buttons, I used about 350, but I had plenty, and some still left over. So now, I have a lampshade unlike anyone else, and my vintage buttons are now on display, instead of hidden in a jar. I’m content with that.

Roaming Roads and Rippling Rivers

After a hectic week, when I’d passed my citizenship test, gained a Tree Steward course certificate, come second place with my Trivia Team, become a U.S. citizen, and then spent a couple of nights losing sleep and a vet visit with poor Malcolm having urinary issues, I was ready to spend time in the garden, catching up with overdue jobs. So I was actually quite relieved to wake up to rain falling, rendering any garden work unlikely, and so decided to take an overdue ‘me’ trip into the countryside and capture the fall foliage, which was peaking this weekend.

While the city folk leaf peepers drove the smooth tarmac roads along the Skline Drive to enjoy the foliage colors, I headed for the graveled and dusty back roads where I met less than a handful of the more adventurous explorers who had chosen to leave the paved roads. The morning’s rain had enhanced the leaf colors. I was surrounded with dark chocolate, rust, golden ochre, lemon yellow, aged raspberry wine, mellowed merlot red, corn husk yellow, and forest greens of firs, pines and cedars.

I stopped by a river, my car the only one in the lay by, and crossed the road to a track I’d spotted between the trees. The trail was muddy from the rain, but the air was crisp, fragrant with the damp earth and Mother Nature beginning the decomposition of fallen leaves.

Purple asters lined the trail, with green mosses on fallen trunks and between tree roots. The river was low after the summer’s drought, more rocks than usual jutting out of the water, the flow of the river slower than I’d seen it before. The river had always cascaded noisily along its route, white caps surfing over the boulders, but today, it meandered around the obstacles, no froth or rivulets swirling along its path. I climbed down to the water’s edge to take photos, mindful of the slippery smooth surfaces of the rocks, still wet from the earlier rain, and if I’d felt more daring, I could have rock hopped from one bank to the other.

Back in the car, I continued along the valley and stopped at a few points, admiring the long shadows from the sun, that had now made an effort to break through the dark clouds and shine down, lighting up the trees and making their colors even more vibrant. The sun’s rays lit up the oranges, yellows and reds, the trees glowing as though aflame.

I left the valley road, and drove upwards into the mountains, the pavement giving way to dusty gravel where Stanley rumbled over washboard ruts that stretched across the road. Friendly locals waved from their homes, some from cars that they bent over and worked on, or sitting on front porches with a beer and chewing tobacco, slowly raising an arm as I trundled by. There was a quiet golden solitude up here, with crisp cool air, the cloudy haze that had hung low in pockets of the valley slowly evaporating in the sunshine. Squirrels leaped and jumped across the road in front of me, busy collecting black walnuts and acorns for their winter store, cheeks stuffed with their treasure.

I spent a couple of hours up on the mountains, meandering along narrow lanes, and passing no other vehicles, apart from a teenager on his ATV, also out for a ride, and enjoying this picturesque afternoon, just like me. I eventually began my descent into the valley, down a rutted switchback road, a steep drop on one side, with the mountains rising up high on the other. I came across a small community, where upon turning a corner, was startled by Jason from Friday the 13th, brandishing a knife, and initially appearing as though he was lurching towards my car. There were also witches hanging from trees, these folks obviously enjoyed Halloween. The next little town had some mystical people with gourd heads, which I admired, but also found a little unsettling.

And then I was back down to a river again, and low and behold, there was a winery on the other side. I stopped for a glass of wine, and chatted to a local environmental group, whose events I’d been to in the past. It had been a lovely relaxing day, and as I made my way home, I was thankful for the rain that morning, I hadn’t realized how much I needed some downtime. Garden jobs could resume after work on Monday.