From an early afternoon gray-day ramble down Piney Woods Church Road, I offer these two suspended moments: a curled leaf, hanging by a single thread to a dried stalk of hoary mountainmint, and a last lingering water droplet clinging to a Russian olive, reflecting trees and sky.
After another overnight rainfall, Piney Woods Church Road vegetation was again festooned with water droplets. I peered into minute worlds and encountered magnificent jewels as I made my way from one end of the road to the other. There are so many discoveries that still await….
It had been a night of heavy rain, and when I set out down Piney Woods Church Road early this afternoon, the air felt quite moist and the temperature an almost balmy upper 50s. There was no trace of a breeze, and many water droplets still clung to the tendrils, branches, and leaves of all the plants edging the roadway. I made my way slowly from one to the next, savoring plant growth transformed by the rain into artifacts of great beauty and wonder. I share today more artifacts of the watery worlds that I encountered, including several images of Russian olives in fruit.
Today I found myself drawn time and time again to the twists and coils of vine tendrils lining Piney Woods Church Road, many of which held water droplets like round glass beads at their tips. With my camera, I collected relics, like seashells on a tropical island beach. Each one is a container for wonder and imagining.
From my afternoon walk, in which I got very damp. In the chilly air and steady rain, I photographed these watery wintery worlds along Piney Woods Church Road.
Some much-welcomed rain showers arrived overnight, and the air felt moist and full of promise as I set out on my afternoon exploration of Piney Woods Church Road today. The water that had covered the leaves and branches of the roadside plants had mostly dried up, except for individual tiny droplets lingering on the tips of a loblolly pine sapling. I had tried photographing them before, with little success. Today’s efforts were rewarded by the photograph below.
I walked Piney Woods Church Road in the mid-morning, after a light rain. This water droplet was about to fall; before I could take a second photograph, it was gone.
Here are a few almost surreal images from a brief foggy morning walk down Piney Woods Church Road, before a frenzied day got underway.
On my way to Atlanta on an errand, almost as an afterthought I stopped at Piney Woods Church Road this morning to take a few photographs. The dew was still heavy on the grass everywhere, and it had rained heavily overnight, too. As is so often the case, I found myself gravitating toward droplets of water. Along the way, I also photographed a pair of reddish-brown leaves (probably pin cherry) at the end of a naked branch. The result is these four photographs, and I simply couldn’t choose one picture among them to single out above the rest. I find delight in the watery marble on a grass blade in the first image; the reflected sunlight in the drop of water on the tip of a sassafras leaf in the second (is that actually a heart I see?); the brilliantly backlit red-brown of the pair of dead leaves against the forest background in the third; and the elegance of the grapevine tendril necklace and with its watery pendant in the fourth. I was blessed four times today, with such moments of stillness and delight.
(As an addendum, I did, in a sense, pay later for my morning. Arriving home from Atlanta with ankles burning, I removed my shoes and socks to find chiggers everywhere! They may have been lodging in my shoes (which I have since run through the washing machine) or they were waiting in the short grass just beside the road this morning to dive onto my feet. Either way, I am beginning to get a bit terrified of the local chigger population this year.)
This image of water clinging to the tip of a leaf along Piney Woods Church Road (after an afternoon rain) reminds me for some reason of pour-offs out West: places where water flowing down a gully after a rainstorm drops abruptly down a vertical face into a canyon — a temporary waterfall, lasting only until the flow subsides again. At the base of this leaf the water pools and waits to fall down onto the waiting gravel far below.
