Underwater Underground

I am using this gloomy day to 'houseclean' my computer and archive/delete old emails. Yay.

Something more cheering: this little creek has cave problems.

Water here, then just a few yards/meters downstream . .

There's a little opening right at the base of the cliff that swallows a lot of the flow, sometimes all of it, and sends it into a cave system. Downstream another hundred yards is a second sink where water goes underground. The one pictured takes its 'stolen' water into an entirely different watershed. The water flowing downstream eventually goes to Evitt's creek, and testing indicated that the underground channel re-emerges in town, at Will's creek. One of the old-timers who grew up in this neighborhood in the forties and fifties told me that his grandfather dumped wheat chaff (which floats) into the stream. I don't know how many people he had watching out for it, to see where it resurfaced - but it did show up in town, about 5 miles away. Kind of a good, low-tech way to figure that out, I thought!

Wouldn't it be nice to be twelve again? Tubing in a cool creek. Who can make the biggest splash.

Calm, happy, sunlit creek, a pup's-eye view.

This one reminds me of a painting, I need to look that up . . .

Oh, yep, that is quite similar. Just a different angle. Jeez, I love water! I guess everybody does. If I could go back and tell my teenage self that I eventually, after tons of trial and error, learned how to paint water, she would be ecstatic.

I should get the hammock out and go down there this afternoon with a book. Hmm.

The weekend rains a-l-m-o-s-t flooded the creek, but not quite. It ran muddy for a day, then cleared up. By Monday it was all ready to sparkle joyously in the sun. I was standing in it to get this photo - bless my wellington boots.

It makes the loveliest noise at this stage. I checked on the silver maple I planted last spring; it has lively-looking terminal buds and seems to be all ready to go for growing season 2024.

Lady living deliciously, please appreciate that fluffy tummy.

Big stones. I'd like to shift the bigger ones over against that bank for erosion protection, but they are extremely heavy. There is also no way to access the stream edge with the tractor from either side.

M-a-y-b-e my son and I could shift them with a metal bar for a lever.

This old stump is so rotted and smoothed off that it looks like a sculpture. It fell roughly ten years ago. (another, smaller fallen tree is wedged against it, now.) It was kind of neat when the whole tree was bridging the stream! I took a series of photos of my son as a Bold Adventurer looking for the Lost City of Skittles (a story my cousin came up with)

We were pretending piranhas. I do miss the days when everything was an Adventure.

Walking dogs

Time for walking dogs, and enjoying the sunset.

Lady is very patient with slow humans. Very

(Actually she was considering carefully whether or not to splash into the water. She chose, wisely, not to)

The creek is lovely in every season except when it dries up completely (sometimes. At the end of summer.)

She enjoys decorating the banks with ice sculptures, and they change every day. It has to be around 15°F/-10°C for a couple days for the moving water to completely freeze over, though. Some years it does and some it does not.

Sunset and elderly border collie.

Hmm. This is either going to turn out amazing or awful. Long vertical pictures hurt my brain, and I do not understand why. Maybe I just need to paint trees over and over until I figure out how to process how they take up space in a forest.

The Gap

September 30

October 7

The dry creekbed is, to me, very sad. About a hundred yards/meters behind me, here, an old bridge was removed and upgraded about 15 years ago. We are on "karst" (limestone) topography, here, which means sinkholes, large and small, are quite common. While the road crew was excavating to put the footers in for the new bridge, they created a space in the creekbed where water can filter underground instead of continuing in its natural bed. Ever since then this section of creek is dry most of the time, although water comes back to the surface just around that curve in the road. When there is heavy rain, there is enough flow to re-water this part of the stream - but it always dries back up as water levels drop upstream. The gap remains, however, one of the loveliest spots on the farm.

Sunny June

   I took Lady on a little midday stroll today, and remembered too late that I meant to take my camera to get a picture of the abundant foxgloves blooming by the stream. So just a short while later Lady got an EXTRA walk because I knew if I kept forgetting/putting it off I’d never get the pictures. She was fine with that, and found new things to sniff and bork at!

They are lovely, the photograph actually doesn’t do them justice. Also, the creek is a green, shadowy place right now.

But there are still a few sun-sparkles on the water, no matter the season!

   Today’s weather is highly uncertain, but yesterday was balmy and sunny and I spent some time down in the creek bottom. Just me, my big pruning shears, two dogs, and Baxter. Lady saw me trying to appreciate the lovely snowdrop and decided her snoot was necessary

Lady, good grief, don’t step on the ONE snowdrop! I don’t need a puppy snoot right now!

The creek was so pretty in the sun.

Baxter learned his lesson about creek crossing, and jumps carefully in the few spots where rocks are close enough. He had a blast clawing the rough bark of locust trees, digging in the sandy soil, and pretending he was a Serious Hunter. The time outside did my heart good.

   Short but sweet. Mountain spring water, the place where it bubbles up from underground is about a hundred yards away.

   This tiny stream in Pennsylvania is just so beautiful. I’ve drawn or painted this site at least five times. The oddest thing is, though, that this fallen log apparently had a curve that matched up perfectly with the ground to produce a dam and waterfall when it fell. Had that tree been straight, the stream would have kept flowing right underneath it.

*chef’s kiss* I love this stream. I should go up there next time it snows.

What I’m experiencing ^

What I’m THINKING about  v