I set out down Piney Woods Church Road at mid-afternoon today, after the early morning rain but well before the promised cold front passed through. A short way down the road, I saw this assassin bug nymph (Zelus luridus) perched on a muscadine leaf. I suspected it was an assassin bug after observing its impressive shnozz (to use the complicated scientific term) which betokened a life to be spent sucking the vital fluids out of other insects.
I cannot choose which photograph to feature today from my mid-morning Piney Woods Church Road ramble. Being pressed for time (a class I teach begins in just a few hours, one hour from where I sit), I will apply my executive privilege and share the three of them as a miscellany. Yellow, reds, greens, and browns — all have their moments here. What an array of colors this season brings us!
Ah, autumn. Time of leaves. So many marvelous images. I could fill entire walls with images of leaves of many colors — each one a page in a story of the year’s passage. Leaves are vessels for wonder and imagination. I cannot cease admiring them.
The last photograph is of a single leaf, folded over on itself.
Alongside Piney Woods Church Road near its intersection with Rico Road, kindred weeds — a sedge of some kind and blossoms of Smartweed/Knotweed (Polygonum sp.) form an early-autumn bouquet for my camera.
This morning as the fog burned away I made my way down Piney Woods Church Road. The air was cool and damp, the scent of wet fallen leaves conjuring autumns past. In homage to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s lovely book, Gifts from the Sea, I offer these two images as Gifts from the Road. The first is entitled “Repose”; the second, “empty::full”.
A native lobelia, possibly Lobelia puberula, blooms in the rain alongside Rico Road, a short distance before the intersection with Piney Woods Church Road and the beginning of my daily walk.
On a drizzling early autumn day, the molted exoskeleton of an Arrowhead Spider lingers in its web like a ghost.
A twig with two shriveled leaves hangs suspended above Piney Woods Church Road, dangling by a single thread of spider’s silk on a cloudy morning.
On a gray, cloudy, misting morning in Chattahoochee Hills, I noticed this leaf lying on Piney Woods Church Road with a circle through it, a window onto the roadbed below.
I have been trying for months now to take a post-worthy photograph of dog fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium), a native perennial weed that can grow up to seven feet tall and take over pastures and even yards. It has slender, feathery leaves that somehow don’t seem to lend themselves to macro photography. But in silhouette, at the brink of sunset, I can begin to appreciate its beauty.
