Valentine's Day Hike

It’s curious to me how a group of strangers will gather on a Sunday Valentine’s Day morning to walk in a preserve. 

An Indian family with am eight year old girl and her teenage sister.  Initially they were worried about the length of the hike, and without a sweep, I was worried what would happen if the young one didn’t want to make it.  But more than halfway through, she had bounded and taken the lead for a bit.  I remember fossil shells in her tiny hand that she had found herself, with no help from her mother or sister.

A Bright Leaf neighbor couple who hikes two or three times year, and the husband was a docent back when Texas Parks and Wildlife ran the place, and he had some great stories.  When we crushed juniper berries and enjoyed the scent, he told us robins sometimes get drunk on fermented juniper berries.  We had passed a small flock of robins earlier – though these appeared sober.

Another couple said they didn’t remember how they first learned about Bright Leaf, but somehow the husband is on our email list, and the finally decided to come.

A single young woman with a backpack and camera phone.  Friendly, but I don’t recall her uttering a word.

Since there was a meetup group of about 12, Bill and I split up.  He took the meetup group, and I led this group of about 12 the “opposite” way, counterclockwise around the loop trail.  I like going this way because you see things differently coming from the opposite direction – and sometimes you see entirely different things.  We often startle some deer on the hillside, and today was no exception.  It’s extremely rare that we see deer when we travel clockwise.  I like to imagine they know our path and our schedule.

As the group approached the creek crossing again at the end of the hike, they displayed the full range of responses I’ve seen – from instantly recognizing they were back where they started, to having no inkling of where they were.  Curious how some of us can turn a scene around in our heads so much more easily than others.

Besides smelling the pungent juniper berries, a few people – more than I expected - tried the tart evergreen sumac berries.     We stopped at one small shinoak on the path that had one set of leaves out, and budding out everywhere else, with catkins hanging.  I also spied the rusty blackhaw budding.  But the redbud tree had not a hint of spring in it yet. 

Spring is dry this year – no rain since December.  Here it seems the timing of rains affects things more than frosts.  My first spring was ash spring – carpets of shin-high ash trees.  Two years ago was goldeneye and crown beard spring.  Who knows what this spring will bring. 

Water is a deciding factor for where we humans live, too.  Seeing Georgia’s house, I’ve just thought about the view being a deciding factor on where that house got built.  But water was a factor as well.  There was no city water supply back in the 30s and 40s. The former docent said the old sealed water pipe sticking out at the top of the trail just before the house is tapped into a spring that Georgia used for water.  So of course the house would best be built below the spring.

He also said the named Kitty Condo was just a recently built storage shed; that the actual kitty condo was the larger building next to it.  I thought that had been the Parks & Wildlife offices, and it may have been after the cats had all died.  But when I pause to think about 30-40 cats trying to co-exist each night in that tiny condo shed, it makes sense to me that they were really in the larger building.  If you look around back, you can see a screened in section where they could lie in the sun.

The eight year old loved “Old Grey” – the last cat standing, and so did many of the adults.  This photo is from a few years ago, and already the jasmine has grown around him so he's mostly hidden.  And now, since I’m at the end of today’s story, I have to disturb my own Annabelle Lee lounged across my shins.