oaken

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Wpg, MB. February 10, 2013.

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The Forest in winter is subtle. A few of last year's wizened mushrooms, half-buried in snow. The odd wizened leaf, caught in the branches and marked by galls and gnaw-marks...

 The girl took her own pictures today, with M's camera. She dunked it in a snowbank two or three times, and she dawdled and whined through nearly a third of the walk, but she also spent a great deal of time peering at tree trunks and deer tracks and leaves, deciding if they warranted a photograph.

This was my second walk in a week. I was so goddamn relieved to see the patches of blue-green lichen on the trunks of the burr oak, which, besides the oak leaves themselves and the bright orange lichen that covers some trees like a suit of clothes, is the only spot of colour in the winter forest.

But I do so love how the white/grey/green aspen glow in winter, especially when there is a lot of snow, as there is this year. The ground and the trees and the sky a shifting but continuous off-white...

And there was this one path, halfway between a deerpath and the 'official' mulch paths - a path that is only walked in winter, broken by dog walkers and people curious about the middle of the forest - that was full of traces of winter activity.

I don't know what was rabbit, what was squirrel or bird or even mice, but it was splashed on the snow like paint.

And I would have looked through the 'tracks and poop' book that I keep in the car on the way home, but the girl was reading it...