trees – whereIwonder&why

Still July 2025

It would appear you can’t shut me up this month.

Yesterday I spent the day at the annual Folk Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts. I’ve been attending regularly for 21 years, so, since 2004. It has gone on since at least 10 maybe 15 years before than that. Parents have borne their newborns to the Folk Festival. White haireds move sibilantly to music they remember from their child-bearing, no, their child-selves lives every year, now, some, themselves, having begun as a thought, or a stroller rider at an earlier Festival; many having begun their lives not only not in Lowell, not in Massachusetts, and not in English. And the Lowell Folk Festival honors that, celebrates it–the music each year is different from the year before, with different artists, and different music traditions, different regions, and different nations. It’s always a musical adventure. Yesterday–note, the Festival is always on the last weekend in July, aka, it’s hot! and each year, the Festival putter-oners get better at providing shade in the four concurrent stage areas, yesterday, one act dressing in traditional clothing wore fur hats. Oh, I could feel their sweat rolling down their faces, necks, while they fingered on stringed instruments complex, complex tunes to which they added words. And each act, no matter how overdressed, how active–and salsa music does not allow static musicians, nor audience; nor does Quebecois; nor does Chicago blues; nor does cajun; nor, even, Irish folk, or klezmer, nor many I haven’t named. The audiences, the myriad visitors roaming the multi-national food stations strategically located near the four stages, sitting within the well covered (by a combination of trees and tree shade–So Valuable, those trees!!! and huge canvas roofs) audience spaces at each stage are all ages, and are all aware of and mindful of everyone else. And, this is a free event operated by volunteers, hundreds maybe a thousand of them (even though it, being an arts thing, non-profit funded both by donations-personal and from some sponsors, and by public funds as a non-profit art thing, got its approved public funding removed in May or June…) It is OMG my favorite place and time each year. If you have not been, consider it next year, make a trip of it from wherever you live.

All this talk, and I took no photographs this year. Ugh. Go to their website: lowellfolkfestival.org. Treat yourself. I meet friends there I haven’t seen in months, once I met someone I had lost touch with years ago, very nice experience among all the other that come to mind.

Onto the smaller local, my back yard. I am pretty sure I mentioned the plethora of fledglings who graced the space at various times these past two-three months. The last were, a bit to my dismay, grackle and starling youngsters. Usually these bigger, not so nice, neighbors visit for a few days, harrass the songbirds and then move along. Their year they nested (most likely in robbed or otherwise pillaged spaces) and fledged right here. Again, I took NO photos. I was too frustrated on behalf of the finches (gold, purple, and house), the titmice, woodpeckers (downy, hairy, redbellied + flickers), chickadees, nuthatches, robins, cardinals, sparrows, warblers, vireos, wrens, mockingbirds, catbirds — some of whom, admittedly, can be less than kind neighbors, and on behalf of me, because all I got to hear was the rather ratchedy screeching of insistent young grackles and starlings, plus the one teenage bluejay who seems to refuse to move house. I think, as of maybe yesterday, they may have moved on. Teenage bluejay is still here. As is, I think, teenage female downy woodpecker, as every single day I witness dueling downys (sp?) out back.

Upper left, adult downy, bottom right child? or unhappy mate at the turned back

It’s been on and off hot, and on and off humid. Saturday was perfect, hot, not humid, after two days of lie on the floor under the ceiling fan with the cats and pant humid. So there was nothing, nothing to spoil that Festival.

Today it rained. The Festival continues until this evening. Attendees are hardy, they will come, and, besides, the rain was only for the first hour, and, also besides, the tent-roof coverings protect from rain as much as from sun.

So here is where I stepped today:

A friend of mine recently taught me something about hy in hydrangea, that I think was mnemonically focused, but I forget what she said! And her information also included the lo in lobelia. I hope when she reads this, she calls me to remind me of the wisdom I have already let slip.

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So, as I am sitting here typing this, a “heat advisory” popped up in my computer’s information line down below. Starts tomorrow. Lasts for, looks like (yes, I just popped over to the site) it hangs on for three days.

Take cover.

It’s July 2025

My intent was, perhaps still is, subsequent words will tell, to offer one of my “places” of observation, a vague meander into what surrounds us where and a curiosity about why.

But I am kind of keening today. I am feeling a lament surging. It is hot in so many places on earth right now, increasingly HOT hot. And sources of relief–water, trees, breezes even, are increasingly being commandeered (or razed) for too rapid, unnecessarily abundant, personal and corporate and governmental storage in search of additional profit, in service to the desire for more. I am sad today.

I am stepping away right now for a bit, in hopes that my mind travels elsewhere before I continue this day’s blogpost. It is 12:13PM EDT right now. I’ll be back.

Returned. The bicycle is a ruse today. Not the day for pushing pedals nevermind in shorts and tank tops, not in, as my shadow indicates, full length jeans and long sleeves.

This, below, is from my backyard just about 15 minutes ago.

I am most appreciative that I cannot see the junk littering the skies above those fast moving clouds.

Here is a good statistic that I report from the backyard this year. There have fledged: two blue jays, a male downy woodpecker, two chickadees, a titmouse, a nuthatch, two female and one male house finch, a female house sparrow, a mockingbird, and a grackle. Most have proceeded through fledgling to immature to mature, and children then away. The nuthatch and blue jay immatures look to be a day, no more, from moving out. This morning I saw my first brown headed cowbirds of the season, happily, after the nests have hatched and mostly flown.

Immature/nearly mature blue jay, chasing through dogwood tree leaves after just ducked-out parent blue-jay.

Here is a bad statistic. In my town, about five streets away, they tore down four trees in deference to granite curbs and repaving, along a quiet, two lane, unmarked, headed nowhere major four block long street, and, based on the “grass” they have seeded in the earth edge between granite curbstone and asphalt sidewalk, these maples and lindens will not be replaced with new shade providing, nicely cooling trees. It will be another asphalt, granite, asphalt alley, inducing residents to install yet another air conditioner or whatever the latest multipurpose “energy saving” inhome unit combination may be, “efficiently using” piped in fuel sources rather than shade-giving, cooling, pleasing to the eye and body-temperature, trees. I stop at the top of the street, mid-street and look down its length and I am sad.

Around the corner and along a street one block from me, three homeowners have blacktopped the majority of their properties so to make room for parking their electric vehicles, their hybrid vehicles, and their low-riding audibly evident otherwise intended compact cars and ___-Tough pickups. What are we thinking?!

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It’s July. It’s hot. The air weighs more than I do. What is wrong with our heads?

Here, cool down.

As I typed, the air has gained weight. I am ready to dive into this lovely, spring day Concord River, were it still this height.

I’m stopping. You are free to go, if, indeed, you stayed through to here.

Delight! Earlier this morning it rained some

I woke to clouds, grey, without shape, just overhead mass, those harbingers of rain, which have been not present much in two or three months. I thought, “I only wish.” And, lo an hour later, it rained!! Not a lot, not loudly, not at any windblown angle, not, in fact so that I’d notice even though I was sitting, having breakfast in front of the kitchen window, looking out at bird feeders, back porch, azalea bushes, dogwood tree, plum tree. I did not see the rain falling. I saw, when I opened the back door to bring the cats’ food can to the recycle barrel, that the ground was wet, the porch steps hosting drops in pleasant array. Ahh, good, I thought.

And it is. And then the clouds, emptied of their gift, slowly slid away, staging shifted for the next act, and the sun in full gold lit the drops of rain, dried surface after surface. I took my bicycle out of the shed and away I rode. (Ahead, I hoped, of the predicted “winds with gusts up to 17 mph”. I don’t fare well pedaling against neither gusts nor steady winds.)

It was a perfect morning to early afternoon ride. Sunlight not only bright, but sparkled off leaves, pebbles, slender branches, and the small, disparate but hope-inducing puddles and ponds gracing the asphalt, and bejeweling the forest floor. (Well, forest is a bit of an overstatement, but poetically it works, don’t you think?).

I am taking delight in all that I can.

White oak leaf bejeweled. Off the rail trail, I walked a short, .4mile path through a wood almost all oak and pine, with a couple of big tooth aspens inserting themselves.

and this, I believe a flaw, but it is a textural wonder, fallen with its host, a small tree, into a new receiving host–a ground covered by more textures than my eyes can understand

And closer. The depth, the girth, the tautness, the layer-after-layer-after-layer of this red pine bark! And who knows what or who I have photographed here in the recesses of the, essentially, the surface of this tree. (Oh what a camera that is not of an iphone12mini could have seen!)

And, another gift, two miles from home, I ran into (not literally) a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of months, also on his bicycle, which was good for so many reasons!

And you know, I almost accomplished my home-ahead-of-the-headwinds goal. Only the last five minutes, that last 1/2 mile push UP to my “Highlands” (the name of my neighborhood) home, did I need (and boy did I need to!) to stand on my pedals and PUSHPUSHPUSHPUSH.

Got in and treated myself to a peanut butter sandwich on my friend E’s homebaked bread. So many pleasures.

Here’s an I-was-there proof shot.

I do wish you could see the brilliance of the colors that covered this rolling path. I can only attest, they were scintillating. And can you see the rolling terrain of the path? And, if you look closely on the ground, you will notice that at least one maple is in this woods, there is leaf just left of the shadow of my hand in front of my face

Whose woods these are, I think I know, his house is in the village though…. Thank you Robert Frost.

Actually these woods are a gift to the town in which they are, by a couple, last name Valentine, who gifted it for wildness into perpetuity. I thank them.

Peace to you and yours.