Earlier today I was loading my kayak back onto the roof of my car when my properly mud, wet, and sweat covered mess of a self detected the wine-red crowns playing queens of the forest adorning one of my favorite plants. It was a little bittersweet, a little sour. Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is by the book and through experience a late-summer-to-early-fall bloomer and the fact that they've blushed and reddened already is making July fly by even quicker than it usually does. Lately the woods have been very red, coming in through both the sweet and the sour, blending together just like the reds and greens in my eyes that the doctors told me at nine were going to be defective. Blessed in my blindness!
Wineberry, blackberry, raspberry. These canes are everywhere here in the Mid-Atlantic adorning jewels into areas of arboreal disturbance, temporary jewels that are the sweeter all the while. The brambles typically ripen in my area around the Fourth of July, but they were about a week late this time.
Earlier last week, my old friend Katie and my new friend Li and I all went foraging after work, with Katie showing me one of her ghost-pipe spots. Sure enough, as the clouds began to move in and every sound and smell indicated an oncoming rain, we spotted a few of the pale-white parasitic flowers poking out of a clearing amongst a grove of young beeches. Along the way I picked some elderflower, which ended up going into a traditional Eastern European drink made up of elderflower and lemons with a little bit of fermentation going on.
As if to serve as yet another reminder of changes in the cosmos that permeate into changing of the seasons and therefore into the bodies of flora and fauna, the July full-moon corresponded with the kids I teach finding multiple lunar moth caterpillars in a few days span. In a few weeks time, these plump green walnut eaters will eventually turn into beautiful pale green moths with no mouths that dance and breed in the New Moon before going back to the dust.
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