A blog about finding balance in your life, connecting with who you are, and creating a lifestyle where you wake up each morning eagerly anticipating the day ahead.
There is a wild apple tree at the edge of our meadow… Sometime during last night, an apple fell off the tree and landed “just right” onto one of these sharp, pointed, broken-off stubs. The apple is impaled on the point… almost exactly through its center…
The Eastern American toad (Bufo americanus americanus… bufo is Latin for toad) is usually some shade of brown, but colors can vary from olive to tan to gray to red and can change depending on the toad’s surroundings and age.
We had a few minutes of minor excitement here yesterday morning when the FedEx delivery person bent down to leave a package, suddenly jumped back and screamed.
After years and years of no porcupines, this fall we kept seeing two… a smaller female and a very large male. Usually they would be waddling around in the meadow.
The combination of damp weather and a new mulching of wood chips created a massive crop of mushrooms around and underneath our hostas.
I want to show you the new frog in our pond. We’ve never seen him before this year but now he seems to be always nearby… usually basking in the sun on a big rock or in the grass at the edge of the pond. He’s easily recognizable because this is a smiling frog.
This time of year the ground is still pretty cold here, and it’s not unusual to find toads buried deep into the soil. If we have any digging to do, we dig very cautiously.
Almost every evening for several days now we’ve been watching three tiny baby skunks as we work in the garden. Two are mostly white except for black markings on their faces, and the third baby has the more usual black-and-white skunk coloration.
“Can ordinary garden toads climb trees? I know I have seen them climbing trees but I can’t find any information to back that up. The toads we have are toads, not tree frogs and they do not have any kind of flat suction pads on their toes.”
We were hearing an unfamiliar bird sound. Baby crows often make a similar racket, but this sound was different somehow… softer and less harsh. It was coming from the dense vegetation surrounding the brook in the field adjoining our property.
The photos are my own. Some illustrate the post... others show our surroundings and the things we love about our version of simple living and voluntary simplicity. I welcome links to my blog or to any of my articles, but please do not copy my photos or content. —Shirley
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