Brer Rabbit I'm not

Third week in November (I know, I know, I haven't posted in forever!) and the temperature is in the high seventies! But there's an Arctic front a-comin', and Thursday night is predicted to be a hard freeze in the low twenties. Appropriate for Thanksgiving. Guess the scarlet sage might finally give up.

I had something of a low-key adventure yesterday at the Ridge. I went for a walk at 4:20 and got back in the dusk at 5:50. More than an hour, I think, of that hour and a half was spent moving step by careful step, working my way out of the briar-patch (that is, mostly blackberry briars, though of course, greenbriers were mixed in there) that I got myself into. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to pick up my feet high enough to step down on one or another thorny stem, without losing my balance while teetering on one foot. I was absolutely DETERMINED that I was NOT going to lose my balance and fall into the stuff, and I didn't, partly I think by pure willpower.

The really cool thing was the tree I found midway through. I found it because of the snake. As I stepped down on one tangle and caused it to shift, I realized there was a pale green 18-inch stripe moving along the stems, not very fast. I reached down and caught the rear part of it and looked at it for a bit -- a lovely snake with a grass-green back and yellow belly, maybe 3/8" thick (probably a Rough Green Snake, Opheodrys aestivus).
After I put it back down on the stems and it started slithering away, I kept an eye on it. It disappeared after a bit into some denser leaves, and there seemed to be something in the clump of leaves that was sort of solid and blackish, with maybe a little reddish tinge. Eventually I realized it was a couple of persimmons! For years and years I have been looking for the female persimmon tree that has to be here, because I find lots of scat full of the seeds, but I have never found any but male flowering trees. But now I know where it is. Next year I'll get a path mowed to it and get there when there are more fruits on the tree.

So I finally escaped, though my shins are a bit perforated even through my jeans. I was rewarded by a quietly spectacular walk through the orange-tinted tall seed-stems of the grass south of the pond, in one of those gold-salmon-mauve sunsets that makes everything ruddy, especially if the oak leaves and grass stems are tending that way already. No camera to hand, and it probably wouldn't have looked real anyway.






This is my persimmon harvest.