From a springtime walk in the woods after supper

April 14, 2025

I went walking after supper last night. We were in-between rainfalls and I was hoping to catch the sound of the peepers, which I had heard for the first time the night before.

I never did hear the peepers but there was still plenty to marvel at in the woods.

There’s a bog behind our house, and multiple lakes and bogs within a couple kilometres of our property, all hidden in the Wabanaki-Acadian forest.

There’s a lot of water here and water is almost always, except for maybe the driest of days in August, moving through the woods, from high to low ground, trying to get to the sea. Living as we do on the river, water doesn’t have far to travel to get there.

Bogs fed by underground springs and filled by rain drain into streams, streams braid into creeks, creeks are directed through the culverts under the road and into the river, the river flows to the ocean.

We’ve had lots of rain to keep the cycle going.

Did you know that trees can bubble in the rain? The turbulence of the water in the furrowed bark agitates particulates on the tree surface to create a crude soap that accumulates at the base of the tree. This was a new discovery for me.

I’ll be happy to see the sun one of these days but the sound of water running through woods, heard when I step out my door, is its own magic. So too is the be-jeweling of everything in water droplets. And bubble trees are pretty cool too.

The colours of autumn have held through the winter, under snow and through freeze and thaw. Yellow, brown, burgundy, and rust, like a 70s paint swatch.

I delight in the millimetre long leaves of bog plants, the centimetre tall stalks of moss sporophytes. You have to bend way down to appreciate these ones.

While I plant the seeds for brightly coloured summer flowers and eagerly anticipate their beauty in my cultivated garden, I notice and appreciate the palette that is right now, the taken-for-granted earth tones, the small things that sparkle and the surprisingly strange things that iridesce, only in the rain.