Late summer was extremely dry and leaves started to fall early for some trees, poplars and maples especially. A few weeks ago there was a short sprinkle that came and went within 10 minutes. I looked out the window and on one of our porches the wet leaves and their patterns were eye catching. So I took a couple of photos.

It’s spring and along with the woods getting ready to burst into green there have been wind storms. The worst so far felled several trees across roads on our property.

This was the largest, a red oak across the road to the Sheep Rocks. This photo was taken from the main road, southeast of our home, where the road to the Sheep Rocks meets the main road.

The oak was what Kelsey calls a Goddess Tree — trees that have two main branches from a short thick trunk. The largest branch is about 24 inches in diameter.

Past the tree looking down the road to the Sheep Rocks. It was in this area years ago we came across some deer nesting. According to our neighbor they now nest up on the hill to the right.

And since it is spring, trees are in the woods getting ready to leaf out.

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.