Small Wonders.

I got out today, between showers, to see which of Nature’s Children might have been coaxed from their seasonal sleep.  All around there were signs of Spring, from green shoots to buds popping in the trees, despite the dampness and the chill wind.  Surveying the gently swaying world, I opted to hunker down for some ground-level investigation.

My first stop was an overgrown stone wall down by the Deerfield, and there I struck Photographer’s Gold – a world of miniature structures clinging implausibly to the weathered schist boulders stacked along the road to Rowe.

Wading into an ankle-deep slurry of last year’s leaves and this year’s run-off, I contorted my tripod in a way which the better ones accommodate and set to work with Ziggy, my 50mm macro lens.

The results were gratifying for an early-season foray – last year’s miniature perennials poking through a bed of lichen:

…the reproductive trumpets of another stage of that lichen:

…and a tiny fern asserting its presence in a crowd of lichens and moss:

These colors are right out of the box, not adjusted in any way; they’re pretty nice just as Nature made them!

Thank you, Mother Earth; thank you, Father Sky.