Saturday, November 7, 2015

beauty in gray

a saturday morning without direction, but with plenty of good purpose... 

eventually william would go to art class and then over to a friend's to keep building a fort they're working on in the woods.  greg would go for his run.  and the weather was not so cold today (despite the fact the sun failed to make much of an appearance) that by the time he got back, i was itching to go outside for a walk.  and i did.  and took far too many pictures.  it's hardly fair to stick them all up here on the blog, but to me it is like a gift to revisit.  there is so much beauty in the landscape here.  it's easy to label it all 'gray' and call it a day (and i often do), but there are wonderful colors amidst the gray.

so listen to a little nina simone while you follow me on my walk.  this song came up on my shuffled playlist twice as i was walking...

four horses...









rainbow...

i stop at the sea buckthorn berries first.  the same grouping we found two or three weeks ago.  i notice now they come off the branches much easier and that they are much fuller today.  i also notice that my hands are not nearly as cold gathering a few up as they were the last time we were here.


that's the thing about danish weather.  no one's expecting to get a second summer by this point in the season, yet the temperatures don't dip down as quickly as they tend to do in the midwest.  we can be in the 40s and 50s fahrenheit for a good long time.  today, we just happened to be at the high end of that.



























i do a large loop and then come back to that first set of berries.  i prefer them to the others i tried along the way, making me think we found the best group.  they are slightly less tart and most come off the branch without turning to a juicy mess in my fingers...

but i'm not gathering them up to take home this time.  just snacking on a few.




after i get home, greg and henry come in right behind me carrying a bag of, what turns out to be, ninety apples (henry wanted us to count).  here he's carefully taking each one out of the bag...  



and he finds this little friend climbing amongst them...

can you see him?  he is a snail.  a very, very, very tiny snail.

henry has pretty little fingers.  this snail is very little indeed...

here he is passing the little guy off to greg...

there was one more little one just like him and both went back outside on their very own very small apple.  

organizing into piles of ten (for counting purposes)...


then they juiced them, boiled the juice, and put most of it away into the freezer for future days...

and then we semi-successfully made tortillas and ate tacos for dinner.

a perfectly good use of a saturday.

3 comments:

Judy said...

Perfect walking music! Thanks for all the pictures.

nina said...

you live in a beautiful place. country walks are hard here: you have to first drive somewhere. I envy you those rural paths. to me, this is a huge difference between the U.S. and elsewhere -- the accessibility of land, even private land -- for strolling, hiking, exploring.

Unknown said...

I loved going on that walk with you, listening to Nina Simone with you, almost tasting that berry and the juice from those tiny apples.