icy day

I certainly liked the actual experience of this place better than the painting of it. Wanting to get in one last hike in Ohio (such close proximity to rural, unpopulated lands is too tantalizing), my father and I took the dogs out to the USDA research station where he works. We often walk there when I visit, since there are a few thousand acres of vacant land at the end of a highway and we usually have the place to ourselves on the weekends. This time he took me to a place I had not seen, down a hill through woods thick with deer (which my dog was thrilled to chase) and briars, to a small pond at the base of a valley, encircled by rolling bare hills. The timber had been cut in a wide swath near the pond's edge, leaving stark stumps and empty trunks towering above. It was a place of solitude...perhaps a little too much. I look forward to seeing it in the summertime, when the leaves and flowers are out and it seems more like a sanctuary than a cloister.