Dear Kay,
Oh, come on, the news is grim, so let’s leave it all behind and go for a walk in the Tennessee countryside.
I tend to walk early in the morning, when there’s still a breeze.
The moss is so much better than the mushrooms this year. I have not seen a single mushroom. The frog pond is low, too.
Not far from my cottage is a ruin of a stone house. There are people around who could tell me the story of this place, but I don’t really want to know.
I’d rather imagine all kinds of stories about this place.
Is this a little stage? A tomb for a leprechaun? The product of a stonemason with terrible aim?
The lichens are hanging in there. Lichens know how to hunker down.
This is on the Cumberland Plateau, elevation 1,920 feet. Not a mountain, really. But enough to make life five degrees cooler than Nashville. I’ve been taking this walk for more than ten years now, a familiar route but never the same twice.
What’s your favorite ramble?
Love,
Ann
PS Thanks for all the ideas about the identity of the fweeoo fweeoo bird is who’s making my every morning an early one. It’s not a Phoebe, Veery, Red-eyed Verio, or Eastern Wood Peewee. I’ll try to catch it in a video so you can play it at 4:49 am every morning. OY.
The website All About Birds is so very excellent. Definitely poke around in there.
Beautiful, Ann!
In my imagination, the builder of the stone house only intended to make a knitter’s bench. Things just grew from there.
#onemorerow
Maybe your bird is a robin! (sorry, can’t let it go!)
Also I would not be able to leave the stone house unresearched. It would be the pea in my mattress.
Love that old stone bench!
Towhee with a Southern accent?
These pictures are a lovely, and soothing, way to start the day. I would definitely want to know the history of the old stone house!!!!! Thanks for yesterday’s ‘beach reads’; I got a few good titles from the list.
I now have this mental picture of you dressed in Elmer Fudd’s hunting gear, looking for that fweeoo bird. Is it fweeoo season, or wabbit season?
Lovely! The stone house is exactly how I picture the ruin in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
I want to go to there!
What wonderful finds you make even after 10 years of the same walk! I lived in a 100-year-old stone house for 11 years of my marriage. The marriage crumbled, but that house still stands!
Everyday I come here to find something beautiful, helpful, interesting. (Or all three!) It’s a routine that starts my day on such a positive note. Salute the sun, get coffee, check MDK. I appreciate that you two make the effort to feed my soul.
I am no help with the fweeoo bird, but I do love the Cornell site. It has helped me ID local birds many times.
Inspiration for another book, perhaps? I enjoyed Bowling Street immensely and keep hoping to hear that you’re working on another novel.
Okay, I can’t resist. Could the fweeoo bird be a wren? Papa Wrens around here are very vocal early birds trying to woo Mama Wrens into their nests. Love the Cornell site too.
My favorite ramble is along the Niagara Escarpment (the same limestone rocks Niagara Falls fall off of but a lot farther west) on the sunset side of the Door County peninsula in Wisconsin. The path is an ancient footpath through cedars and aspens, mossy and fragrant, with the ceaseless sound of the Bay of Green Bay pushing itself over the rocky beach at the base of the bluff. I wish I were there right now but have to content myself with waiting until late September when my broken ankle will be sufficiently healed to risk the rocks and roots.
The damn news made me cry yesterday. It is just too friggin much. Anyway, onward and upward. Love this ramble in the woods! Like Mo, I would just have to know about that old stone house. It is amazing what you can easily find out these days.
We don’t have a fweeoo bird, we have an singing-all-night, very lonesome and sexually frustrated mockingbird. I so wish I could get him a mail-order lady mockingbird to join him in quiet, wedded bliss.
The stone bench. Dream of knitters everywhere. I walk to work over the Mississippi most days, each time the river seems different. Especially, of course, when covered with ice.
Oh, it is grim. Thank you for your beautiful pictures and writing and for taking me away from it all, even if only for a little bit.
Could it be a chickadee? They sure are noisy buggers up north here in the morning.
If I were a little girl, and I discovered that stone house, I would be playing in it every day. Just imagine all the magic and the reenactments.
Around here, the first bird is usually a robin. They are in charge of getting all the other birds up. I do remember a neighbor I had once who was so frustrated by the early birds that she would yell at them from her bedroom window. It was about as effective as you think it would be.
What a beautiful walk! It’s weird, I don’t think of the plateau having cooler weather like in the mountains but it makes sense they would.
I’m voting Carolina Wren.
Black-capped chickadees have a fee-oo song as well as the the chicka-dee-dee-dee one. I always see tons of them up in Beersheba.
Favorite ramble is a hemlock-lined path that slowly descends into a little gorge where a fast running brook flows clear over a broken rock bed. Only this year it’s been so dry that the brook is just a trickle punctuated by still pools. But still a lovely walk.
But about that bird … cardinal? They are usually one of the first birds to sing in the morning, and have a bunch of different songs, most all of them loud rich sweet whistles. and some involving repeated downward slurred tones. Here are a couple samples:
http://tinyurl.com/z4yvj73
https://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/213625#_ga=1.131017167.1102856640.1466908056
And here’s a third one, recorded just two months ago in Tennessee – although each Cardinal sing over a dozen different songs and calls, so this recording probably sounds nothing like what the same bird was singing ten minutes later!
https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/27136391#_ga=1.220138841.1102856640.1466908056
It’s so hard to guess without any idea about pitch or tone quality – go ahead, post a clip and I promise to get up and listen at 4:30 am!
(Sorry to mislead you about Veery – I was suggesting that for Qunin’s fluid sounding twin-toned waterfall bird.)
I need to get out of the city and ramble more. Wish I had time for a trip to Acadia this summer. Rambling in Downeast Maine is amazing.
I think that large patch of moss is Leucobryum glaucum, the pincushion moss. It has big clear cells in it that helps give it that light sheen. I want to spend an hour facedown at that rock with the lichens and mosses with my hand lens! (And then another couple hours at the microscope!)
What a lovely spot. I am going to pretend it is where Hobbits lived before us large folk came and caused them to run off.