Vacuum

post-storm mushroom 5/5

post-storm mushroom 5/5, originally uploaded by Edward Vielmetti.

Big storms came through town and dumped somewhere between 2 and 4 inches of rain in the neighborhood. A morning walk showed a lot of mushrooms that came out including these unknown varieties growing on a dead (or partly dead) tree.

Posted by Edward Vielmetti from Flickr.

Sand County Almanac, June: "The Alder Fork - A Fishing Idyl"

We found the main stream to law that the teeter-snipe pattered about in what last year were trout riffles, and so warm that we could duck in its deepest pool without a shout. Even after our cooling swim, waders felt like hot tar paper in the sun.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. This 1989 Oxford Paperbacks edition, ISBN 0-19-505928-X, as an introductory essay from Robert Finch commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leopold's birth.

We see Leopold, the rural sage, tracking a sunk in January, cutting a venerable dead oak, stalking a legendary fish on Alder Fork or an elusive grouse on an abandoned farm, surveying his private unofficial domain before dawn, wrestling with god-like decisions about tree-thinning, or experiencing a "curious transfusion of courage" from his pines in deep winter.

Sand County Almanac is a good book to come back to every month year round.