Three Seasons
I haven’t been posting since the April windstorm for a variety of reasons. I hope this collection of photos and text makes up for that. We’ll begin a few days before the storm at Sock’s frog pond, a favorite location to take photos in the spring.

When I took this photograph it was raining lightly. I love the nearly abstract blends of color and shape.

Amongst the chores are periodic maintenance and repair of our ATV and the MSU, a 4×4 side-by-side UTV. The MSU has two seats (thus side-by-side), cabin roof and windshield, and a bed great for hauling groceries and firewood. This is a shot of the passenger side of the engine that I took before I replaced the fan gears, part of the linkage between the gear shift and the transmission. The cover for the gears is just to the right of the black oil filter. At a certain point, the gears wear out making it impossible to shift. This was the third time I’ve done this so that’s about once every three years. Earlier this year I had to replace the one-way bearing in the drive clutch for the transmission, an all-day job. The one-way bearing provides engine braking when going down hills.

Mid-summer foliage provides full shade for our home and the forest floor. We are perhaps 10 degrees cooler in our woods than the ambient temperature ten miles away towards Charleston where there are few trees and much pavement.

Once leaves appeared on trees the impacts of the April storm became less prominent. Here a pine was twisted by the storm until it fell across the road following the county line between Putnam and Kanawha.

This summer beginning in June until the beginning of autumn we were in an area suffering from severe drought. In September some trees had their leaves turn color and immediately go to brown and fall. We expected the worst, though normal fall colors with leaves lasting longer on trees occurred in October. In September we feared our blaze of fall gold wasn’t going to occur. It was nice that our fears proved wrong, though we’ll see next spring how extensive tree mortality from the drought will be.

This photo shows the canopy over our buildings. The house is to the left, the shack is to the right and the shop roof extends to the left of the shack.

More pretty colors.

I love finding that single red leaf on the ground surrounded by leaves of differing shapes and colors.

Taken in the garden with a tall white oak in the foreground and the moon a tiny dot overhead.

Taken in the garden but I can’t remember where I shot this photo. I think this is a felled beech tree now a bush to the west of the garden fence.
We’re in winter now. Several snows have fallen and melted away leaving leaves on the ground matted down and less a fire hazard until spring. There’s a light snow on the ground with a clear blue sky as I write this. It’s cold so we have both wood stoves burning with cats in front of each.
December 22, 2024