Now it is trying to be spring.

We were late in tapping maples trees for sap this year. We made a little syrup but nowhere near as much as last year. This maple is next to the county line road between our garden and our home.

We’ve also been cutting firewood, all from dead trees. This is part of the road shown in the Walking post. We cut and split the dead oak that had fallen across the road and stacked the firewood under a blue tarp. This is in part of our woods where we decided we’d not fell any trees, not even dead ones.

Every now and again I take a decent photo. This is a vernal pond with frog eggs. The spring peepers, until they warm up, sound like slow quacking ducks. Later in the spring turtle eggs hatch and we’ll have to watch our step. The babies are about size of a nickel.

In January we had a heavy snow, about 18 inches though it was deeper in places. My mom is 95, has dementia, but is able to live on her own with our support. Every day I walked to her home, through the deep snow. The walk normally takes about 40-45 minutes one way. Until I had a path beaten down in the snow the walk took about an hour and a half.

This part of the walk is along the county line road north of our house. Our property at this point is along the west side of the road.

The night it snowed heavily there was a lot of deer activity. The next day, however, after the snow stopped I didn’t see signs of critters moving about. A couple of days later, deer were out again. Their tracks can be seen to the right of mine. Sometimes they used the path I’d created, turning off to browse. Once the snow had melted to just several inches deep there were all kinds of signs of animal activity — turkey, fox, mouse, rabbit, small bird, possum and so on.

I originally planned on “retiring” the first of the year but I’ve ended up pushing that date into the second quarter of 2016. There’s really not that much difference at this point between being retired or not and what I’ve been doing is trying to go for a walk in the woods each day for 40 minutes to an hour, sometimes much longer than an hour. I can plan my walks so there are different types of “workouts” depending on the grades.

Sometimes I stay on our property. Sometimes I wander further south into property that partially borders ours that has come up for sale (250+ acres if anyone is interested).

A few days ago I took along a camera and here are photos, most without commentary.

This is Christmas Fern which generally stays green well into the new year. Some years we’ve seen green fronds peeking out from deep snow. No snow so far this year.

This is a tree stump that has almost entirely deteriorated into fragments of wood with moss decorations.

The day was extremely overcast.

I took a lot of photos of this cut section of an oak log.

1. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1942) — I really liked this book by the way:

“After that the man had come around to her side of the table and kissed her rather greedily. She had fought him off for a long time, but at length her will had softened. She had felt tired and kind, and thought, Why not? Then there had been something peculiar about the love-making itself — but she could not recall what it was. She had tried to keep aloof from it, to be present in body but not in spirit. Somehow that had not worked out and she had been dragged in and humiliated. There was some comfort in this vagueness, but recollection quickly stabbed her again. There were (oh, holy Virgin!) four-letter words that she had been forced to repeat, and at the climax, a rain of blows on her buttocks that must surely (dear God!) have left bruises. She must be careful not to let her aunt see her without any clothes on, she told herself, and remembered how once she had visualised sins as black marks on the white soul. This sin, at least, no one would see.”

2. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969):

” ‘What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And they will never understand the reason for my crime.’ She paused, as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first time. ‘Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more.’ “

3. Courtney Ryley Cooper, Designs in Scarlet (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1939) — On spanking clubs and other nefarious activities with a dash of Lautremont tossed in:

“Remember always that it is the sado-masochist who attacks little girls, or who slashes out their bowels, or who beats women to death and rapes them after life has left their bodies.”

Cooper wrote screenplays for movies and true crime for pulps.

4. I’ve been extraordinarily busy recently finishing a project started two years ago.

5. The leaves are starting to fall off the trees:

“At my poore house you shall behold this night,
Earth treading stars, that make darke heaven light.”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, first (or bad quarto), I,ii.

This has gone through several iterations. Kelsey’s the hardest and she’ll be last. The people mentioned are all from the Cast of Characters post.

Look alikes is a fun game. Since there are no photos of the people here you’ll just have to trust me.

Sometimes when I see photos of Angelina Jolie I see the Dancer. Change Angelina’s hair to red and add green eyes. A while back the Dancer sent photos of her kids and her daughter looks just like her, lucky girl.

The American Artist is close to Kate Moss in face and build. Like Kelsey, the American Artist hasn’t gained weight since high school. Kelsey has letters I wrote her in the 1970s in which I described the American Artist, using others’ words, as a long legged beauty.

Give Lily Donaldson dark hair and take away the cleft of her chin and she’s close to the Joker. The Joker modeled when she was in high school, was slender and narrow hipped with delightful small breasts. For Feral Rabbit I wrote a post titled Perfect Breasts. The Joker wasn’t mentioned. For years I thought her breasts were ideal and small breasted women held a fascination. This was, I think, because sex with the Joker was so energetic.

One night I wanted to drink wine from the Joker’s breasts. I’m a klutz and couldn’t pour from the bottle and drink at the same time without hitting myself in the head. I asked and the guy who was watching climbed up on the bed and poured for us. Red wine, dry, flowed over her and I couldn’t catch it all.

The actress in the movie In Bed (In la Cama), Blanca Lewin, actually looks a lot like the Beautiful Woman in face and body except the nose. In the way Lewin portrays her character, though, she’s pure Kelsey. That dance is Kelsey, not the Beautiful Woman, and a little of the story.

Perhaps the one who looked most like Kelsey was a model in a mid-1990s Guess advertisement. She captured both Kelsey’s appearance and style. I can remember that model in only one set of ad pages in Vogue; perhaps she appeared elsewhere too.

Kelsey is a chameleon. So of course, Michelle Dockery, playing Death’s daughter in Hogfather, comes close, too, in appearance and existential ambience. Kelsey’s face can change from long and slender to heart shaped in the blink of an eye. In its oval incarnation she’s Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferroniere in the Louvre. Another moment she’s da Vinci’s Madonna Litta. Perhaps it’s the lips.