Another Part of My Path

My husband created this trail four or five years ago with the lawn mower. I turned back and took a picture after I had walked down the rise. This is a really beautiful place to walk at any season of the year, but especially when the moss has had enough rain and is green and soft.

I think these bright orange mushrooms are some kind of Hygrophorus. When we were first married, we used to drive up to Ludington, Michigan, for meetings of the West Michigan Mycological Society, and go out on their mushroom forays. We learned a lot about edible mushrooms, deadly poisonous ones, and pretty ones. Most of the waxy cap mushrooms are described as "edible" by my field guides, but for my taste, they are too small to bother gathering. I prefer to enjoy them with my eyes!

Here is the same trail, at the bottom of the little rise. When it is hot in the summer, it is beautifully shady here. My husband tried edging this path with logs that were too punky to burn in the soapstone stove, but the raccoons and skunks think of them as a buffet! They tear them all up with their claws to get at the grubs inside them, and roll them all over.

Decades ago, this was a small farm with sweet cherry trees, peach trees, a few apple trees, and Concord grapevines. The peach trees were mostly pulled out before we bought the property, and only two of the sweet cherry trees survive.

But the grapevines have run wild. It wasn't a very good year for grapes. First they got frosted just as they were blooming, then the weather turned wet at the end of the season, and even the grapes in cultivated vineyards suffered from mildew. In many years, I can pick a bunch of grapes and eat them as I walk, but there were only a few this year.

One year we gathered them in paper grocery sacks, and I made a grape pie, which is truly a labor of love: first you squish each grape out of its skin, saving the skins. Then you cook the pulp and strain out the seeds. Finally you put back the skins and bake them with the pulp. It actually makes an excellent pie, reminiscent of a blueberry pie, but it's a lot of work.

Obligatory Knitting Photo

The fiber fest socks are nearly done. It felt weird to think I would have no socks on the needles, so I rooted out a skein of Wool-Ease from the stash and started some more. It was amazing how much more quickly the knitting went, with bigger yarn and bigger needles. I knitted three or four inches of two sock toes in odd moments yesterday afternoon.

I'm not sure what I'll be knitting next. I have to think about a medallion for the West Michigan Lace Group exchange. That will probably be tatted. Or would a small knitted doily count as a medallion? Hmmm.