"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.
There have been some concerns raised in the land trust community that one of the impacts of climate change will be the displacement of some native species by others that are expanding their ranges. A recent article by Attorney James L Olmsted entitled: "The Butterfly Effect: Conservation Easement, Climate Change and Invasive Species"suggests a number of changes that land Trusts can make to their easement language to anticipate this problem, but the underlying premise that in-migrating North American species "will in many cases be invasive" is on questionable scientific ground.
It is wrong to think
of species and natural communities as static and restricted to where they are
today, or were at the time of European contact.
The term “Invasive” is
both relative in space and time and too
broadly applied to North American species that are expanding their
natural ranges in response to environmental factors and opportunities. Birds have been doing this for a very long
time. The black vultures now present in
large numbers in Connecticut were not found north of Maryland in the first part
of the 19th century (all those dead horses at Gettysburg gave them a
beachhead). Cardinals were not part of
my mother’s Massachusetts girlhood. Coyotes
are filling an available large predator niche after the extirpation of wolf and
cougar populations.
The term “Invasive” has more validity when it is restricted to introduced species, and then only to those which have such characteristics as spreading across
spatial gaps, establishing virtual monocultures and multiple dispersal methods. Having these attributes, species
should be demonstrated to displace and
outcompete native species to be considered invasive. Under this
definition, House Sparrows are invasive, but Cattle Egrets which, bless their
hearts, got here by crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean all on their
own, are not.
When I was part of the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group that
developed criteria to determine which species should be considered invasive or
potentially invasive in the Commonwealth, we had a very hard debate about Black
Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), a central Appalachian species which can be
problematic in pine barren systems in the Northeast. Had the glaciers receded a few thousand years
earlier, Robinia would likely have expanded its natural range a few hundred
miles further north, resulting in a different kind of natural community where
it overlapped with pitch pine and scrub oak.
Humans helped it make the jump, planting Black Locust for fence poles
(which sometimes resprouted!).
My advice for anyone drafting a conservation easement or management plan is to start by answering
the question; “What are we trying to conserve and managing for?”
The question of invasiveness relates directly to whether a species
impacts the viability of conservation targets. The best example I can remember from my TNC
days concerned a fen in NJ that was also a bog turtle site. The fen had a large and expanding incursion
of purple loosestrife (an exotic species non-native to North America). There were two possible conservation targets
to manage for at this site: the rare natural community represented by the fen,
and the federally threatened bog turtle species. The condition of the fen was severely
degraded and attempting to eradicate the loosestrife threatened worse
disturbance as well as the bog turtles that still were using it, so it was
determined not to try to manage the fen as fen, but as bog turtle habitat. The bog turtle basking areas were being shaded out by the loosestrife, so
the management prescription was to cut the loosestrife stalks by hand each year
before they set seed. This took several
days of cutting by hand, but was the best response available to conserve the primary
conservation target.
So, if we are managing for rare and restricted habitat types, some of
which will not be viable in their current configuration, or indeed in any form with
climate change, we are making a choice to prioritize them against the
prevailing forces of change. That may
indeed be the right thing to do, but even then the calcareous fens of Connecticut
will not have the same species composition and structure as those in Maryland
even when our climate changes to that of Maryland today.
There are special gaps that are unlikely to be crossed by native fen
species present today in Maryland but not in Connecticut. That is the beauty of natural variation. Diversity matters, but it plays out in many
different ways from site to site.
Especially with large, “functional” landscapes, the idea is not to
manage them to maintain exactly the species types and forest composition of
today, but so that they are robust and resilient enough to maintain
biodiversity, in whatever forms may be viable in the future. Invasive plants may well be a factor that
needs to be accounted for, but it does not begin or end with a list of species
that are “meant to be here” and others that are not.
I can hardly believe that it was just a few weeks ago that I spent a week with family and friends on Monhegan Island. I've been coming to this amazing place, 12 miles off the coast of Maine, since I was six years old, Though there have been some years when I was unable to do so, by my count I am nearing two dozen visits to the Island in every season, including New Years Day.
There is always something different on trips to this very familiar place. One the way back to shore as we watched pairs of porpoises leaping after fish, I looked over at Eastern Egg Rock and declared that this time I would see a puffin. Not two minutes later, there it was, close by the boat and unmistakable with its great wedge of beak. IN WIDE-EYED WONDER I pointed after it as we passed - "Puffin. Puffin! Puffin! PUFFIN!" I had never seen one of these birds before in the wild, and it was as if wishing had made it so. Monhegan is like that. It is hard not to believe in magic when under its spell.
I loved sharing it with Talya for the first time, and seeing her spirit lift like sea fog from the rocky shore. She said it was the nearest to Scotland she could be, except that it was warmer. There is nothing like having new eyes, those of a lover or a child, to show you something new about a place you know and love. My children know and love the Island as I do, but with their own associations and their own memories. The Ice Pond of old is the Duck Pond to them, and Sea Goblins have joined the trolls of the spruce forest in their play.
We had exceptionally fine weather, with rain largely confined to the pre-dawn hours and only one foggy morning that soon burned off. There was one day, though, where heavy squalls passed between us and the mainland, setting up one of the most spectacular sunsets I have ever seen. The cottages on Monhegan face west, and watching the sun go down is a a ritual part of the day. We added a new ritual this year, waking before dawn on our last morning on the Island and hiking out tot he cliffs to watch the sun come up in golden glory.
I cannot tell whether the fog that hangs in the air outside will burn off later today, or continue to mist through the trees and keep everything green and damp throughout the day. My vegetable garden calls for my spade, and if I do not make the time to thoroughly work over that small patch of ground it with be thick with deep rooted weeds when I plant it in earnest a week or two from now. Another bed of perrenial herbs and wildflowers is overrun by choke cherry suckers, and it may be that this year I am forced to destroy the garden to save it. There is garlic mustard testing the boundaries of my modest backyard from beachheads it has established at the property lines. Ignore that, and the choke cherry suckers will be but a modest inconvenience in comparison.
I love gardens in spring, however, especially the one that contains ephemeral wildflowers. I have let the dog toothed violets and ramps seed and grow where they will, and watched with delight as new Jack-in-the-Pulpit plants appear in other parts of the flower bed from their parent. There are Dutchmen's britches and bloodroot and both have started to find new niches amid the ferns. There are trillium and wild geraniums and wild ginger, and even a clump of calcium-loving large yellow ladyslippers. There is a new seedling growing this year, apart from the clump of many flowered stalks nearby, and I believe it has accomplished that most unusual feat for one of these orchids and actually germinated.
Later in the season the cardinal flowers and white turtleheads will rise above the fading green leaves of these plants as the early flowers have all gone to seed. I'm not sure what blight did in my formerly vigorous stand of Giant Solomon's Seal but it has all but vanished where once it flourished. I watch, and I weed, and I wonder, and still it is this garden that helps me mark the progress of Spring to early summer better even than the uncurling maple leaves, or the nesting wrens at the back of the yard. It has taken a decade for this garden to assume its present shape, and with luck, and a bit of intervention when an invader makes a run at it, it will continue to evolve and change for many years to come.
We have some truly spectacular waterfalls here in the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills and all along the Taconic Plateau. I make a point of visiting as many of them as I can in every season. Here are a few shots taken during this past remarkably warm and snowless winter of Bash Bish Falls in Copake, NY and Campbell Falls in New Marlborough, MA .
There is no meltwater this Spring, and many of our flashy, ephemeral streams will likely run dry as the season advances. Still, something about a cleft in the rock and falling water always feels spectacular.
All this past week, my dry winter house has been bathed in the sweetest of steam. The sap began running in my backyard sugar maple at the end of January, several weeks early than is usual for any year but one with a false Spring. While it is not a heavy flow, it has persisted since then and produced enough so far that I have already sugared off nearly a pint of stove top syrup and look forward to more.
It is a delicate, intoxicating perfume. It lacks the briny tang of cold sea fog, or the maltiness of brewer's wort, but is still every bit as pungent and evocative. When mingled with woodsmoke from a larger sugaring operation than my two pail affair, it takes me back down the muddy lanes of memory to my Upstate youth. I breathe in that coiling steam and can almost feel my hair curling in the unaccustomed humidity. To stand in a sugar shack on a bright winter day is to be enveloped in nectar like a drunken bee.
I know the smell of approaching rain on a hot, dry wind. Maple steam has the same affect on me, full of expectancy, alive with the promise of life returning. I tap my maple tree because it grounds me, draws me back to my roots and turns me forward. The ringing pail fills slowly with sap that at first is one shade greener than clear. Each hour on the boil with the white steam rising transmutes it to amber gold.
When the lights went out on the backside of Irene, it helped to have a Mawrter in the house, as they come with lanterns. My writer in residence has two red glass panes and two blue ones in her Bryn Mawr lantern, because she finished in 3 1/2 years and so overlaps two difference classes.(1993 and 1994).
We came through the storm far better than the rest of our region. The trees that came down were scattered - the wind culled mostly the old and the sick - and our power came back after 18 hours. There are parts of CT, within 45 miles of us that still have no juice. My basement filled completely with water for the first time since I have owned the place, but drained just as quickly once the power came back and I put in a new sump pump. My garden was not ruined. We were spared what others were not, and that about sums it up.
There was plenty of rain, and the Housatonic and its tributaries rose in flood, but Vermont, NY and NJ had it far worse. It was impressive standing by the Great Falls of the Housatonic on Monday, the first day of school having been cancelled, and watching those chocolate waters plunge. I've seen the river this way in the winter, thick with snow melt and the trees rimed with ice from the spray, but the foliage and the sunlight were an interesting variation. The Hous is over Ramapo Rd. in Ashley Falls to a depth of 4-6 feet, flooding the oxbows and making a lake out of the floodplain by Bartholomew's Cobble. Otherwise, the tribs are where the damage was greatest, gnawing away the sides of the little state roads that connect the villages of the Litchfield Hills.
I have not been down to Windrock since the storm, but reports from family who have are that the property came through in fairly good shape. There are a couple of big trees down, most notably the grand old oak where the Orioles like to nest at the side of the house. It was rotten to the core and mercifully fell without so much as grazing the house and porch. My cousin Rob Canham stands next to the fallen giant in the image below. and also took the picture of the "Hell Cat" beach fort which did not get swept out to sea, even though the tide should have been high with a new moon and storm surge.
As predicted, the cougar killed on a parkway in SW Connecticut came East from a population in South Dakota. From the Black Hills to the Gold Coast was a trek of 1,500 miles, and along the way this same individual was detected in Minnesota and Wisconscin.
"Some experts suspect this could be the same animal filmed by a trail camera in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, leading wildlife experts to map its likely path from the U.S. into Ontario Canada, circling the Great Lakes and eventually crossing back into New York and Connecticut."
This is the same route taken by the western Coyote on its move into the east. It is the first wild mountain lion confirmed by the authorities in CT in 100 years. There will be more.
The venerable History Carnival celebrates its 100th edition this month. It all began as a fortnightly affair back in January, 2005, and carried on that way through the first 50 editions. It then shifted to a monthly schedule in April, 2007 and so it continues to this day.
This state of affairs makes it challenging to apply an appropriate commemorative modifier to History Carnival 100. I suppose one might call it something along the lines of the "Demicentimensiversary Edition", but I'm no fan of the tendency in certain academic circles to invent needless, inelegant jargon instead of communicating in clear and lucid prose. All this manages to accomplish is to problematize structural totalities under the rubric of hegemonic hermeneutics, n'est-ce pas? Damn skippy. History Carnival 100 it is.
Here at Walking the Berkshires, we serve up history the way we like our single malt: neat, with plenty of smoke and peat and a dry lingering tail. Some light agitation helps to bring out all the subtle notes and complexity: less a kick in the jaw than warm oil on the tongue...
Excuse me a moment...Mmmm....Ahhh. Caol Ila, 12 Years Old. Right, well, why not help yourself to the beverage of your choice, and we'll get on with the show!
Alternate History: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ignorant
I am extremely fond of counterfactual history when it is done well. So much of the actual history has to be right in order for the fabrication to hold together. There is also the possibility that 2nd order counterfactuals stemming from the first might well bring about the same historical outcome from a different direction. Sometimes, no matter where they begin, all roads must inexorably lead to Rome.
One of the first rules of counterfactual hypothesizing is to make as few changes as possible to the conditions leading up to the alternate reality. We are talking about the lack of horseshoe nails, here, not the gun that won't exist until 2419 - cool as that is - as described by the National Museum of American History Blog.
Speaking of events that may yet come to pass, the question of whether there should be a new monument to Virginia State troops at Antietam is the subject of a fascinating post at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory. Brian Schoeneman, a candidate for elected office in the Virginia House of Delegates, gamely weighs in at several points during an extensive comment thread - every bit as interesting as the post itself - in support of his campaign pledge to make this happen.
An excellent example of alternate history done right is featured this month at Today in Alternate History, which speculates on what might have been, if only Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand had avoided assassination in 1914. Would you believe resurgent Hapsburgs, giving rise by 1930 to a "Triple Monarchy of Austria-Hungary-Slavonia, Turkey, and a docile but resource-rich Romanov Russia under the frail hemophiliac Tsar Alexander IV"?
Certainly that is more believable than some of the self-deceptive mangling of American history perpetrated recently by some of the most prominent faces of the Tea Party movement. I felt compelled to offer these candidates for the highest office in the land a helpful multiple choice quiz on our Revolutionary history, but J. L. Bell of Boston 1775 corrects the record on Sarah Palin's mistatements about the Midnight Rider with far more class and less snark than I could muster. Quoth he;
"So did Palin share a correct and uncommonly knowledgeable interpretation of Revere’s ride? Or was she correct only in the way that a stopped clock is correct if you look at it in exactly the right way and ignore it a second later? That argument might have raged forever, but then someone came along and made it impossible to maintain that Palin enjoys a detailed, accurate understanding of the start of the Revolutionary War. That person was Sarah Palin."
"...in his Houston speech to the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan fell for one of the great hoaxes of American history, surpassed in taking people in only by H.L. Mencken`s enchanting fable about Millard Fillmore’s installing the first bathtub in the White House,” Schlesinger wrote. “The author of the less than immortal words Lincoln never said was an ex-clergyman from Erie, Pa., named William J.H. Boetcker.”
Airminded examines British media claims during WWII that RAF precision bombing in reprisal for the Blitz was morally and technically superior to indiscriminate Luftwaffe bombing, and finds them wanting:
"Nearly everything in these articles is, at best, wishful thinking. Bomber Command's aircrew may as well have shed their bombs as aimed them, for all the difference it made: as the Butt Report revealed the following year, only one in four aircraft dropping bombs over Germany did so within five miles of their target point. The intention was 'accurate bombing', but the effect was indiscriminate (when the bombs didn't fall on open countryside, that is, which most of them did)...as things were, it's just not possible that what the RAF was doing to Germany in late 1940 was more effective (in any sense) than what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain."
Still, for my money, if your history is going to be bad, it might as well be entertaining.
"This is a history that gets overlooked or ignored because of recent debates in the West over garments-as-oppression for other women–you know, Afghani women in burkhas, or other Muslim women covered by the hijab or la voile. As though Western women’s clothing has never been an issue in their citizenship or their feminism!"
And then we have certain minted pneumismatic artifacts of scholarly interest blogged about at Hypervocal. Be forewarned that these may be considered NSFW in some quarters. Are they ancient Roman brothel tokens, or possibly pornographic gaming pieces? At right, a proposed design for a modern token, suitable for use by disgraced US Congressmen in exchange for sexting services, appropriately priced at "sex asses", if I remember my High School Latin.
(I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that certain internet search terms taken out of context from the preceding paragraph are going to single handedly make History Carnival 100 the most heavily visited edition of all time. Just imagine if I had included extended pasages from The Satyricon...)
Blinding Me With Science
It seems appropriate at this point to bring up the subject of censorship. Take, for example, the history of the active suppression of various lines of scientific inquiry. There have been a number of mutually sustaining blog discussions this month on this topic, including one at Christopher M Luna that opines;
"the tendency to label pre-nineteenth century thinkers as scientists created the “possibility of a false impression that science is somehow eternal, separate from the people who practiced it, just waiting to be revealed” and that such an impression could lead to “a problematic faith in progress, a misunderstanding of the scientific method (as though it is static or eternal), and, perhaps most popular these days, a mischaracterization of the interaction between people investigating the natural world and religion."
"The heliocentric hypothesis says that heliocentricity offers a possible model to explain the observed motion of the planets; it says nothing about the truth-value of this model. The heliocentric theory says that the universe is in reality heliocentric. In 1616 the Church banned the heliocentric theory but not the hypothesis. This might at first seem like splitting hairs but in reality it is a very important distinction."
In a similar vein, Jeannie at Tripbaseblog offers her picks for the 8 Most Inspiring American Speeches of All Time and presents their settings as potential history tourism destinations. I confess I would not have thought to include Swami Vivekananda in this lineup, but I wouldn't mind a visit to Chicago (when the Cubbies are in town).
Thomas Dixon's The History of Emotion's blog delves into emotional animals in history and offers up a 1705 account of a weeping horse in Augsberg. I'll see your horse and raise you a Beagle - Schultz's, not Darwin's.
Reading and Misreading
Sandusky Library/Follett House Museum posts at Sandusky History about The Prisoner's Farewell by Irl Hicks, a confederate POW, who upon release at war's end was selected to give a Valedictory Address to the Young Men's Christian Association of Johnson's Island Ohio.
Anchora discusses the relationship between the use of inverted commas in early modern texts as commonplace markers and Kindle's "popular highlights" feature. Here's mine from hers;
"Once you become aware of the significance of inverted commas in early modern books, though, you will never read them the same way again -- it opens up an entirely new (if, perhaps, still familiar to us) way of reading in which texts are mined for pithy, quotable passages."
Mark Liberman at Language Log takes his shots at the media bias toward "sensationalism, conflict and laziness" and offers up this post entitled "A Reading Comprehension Test". Are you smarter than the designers of this American History test for 12th graders, the educational expert who assessed its results, and the news outlets that covered those findings?
"My recent engagement with the wonderful world of blogs and Twitter has certainly shown me both more interest in and more misused history of science than I had previously come across. (I do not feel, in some cases, that misuse is too strong a word. What the Tea Party do to 18th-century American history, supporters of ID do to Darwin and both sides in the arguments about what Christianity has and has not done for science tend to do to the whole history of Western science.) "
Once again, the comment thread is as thought provoking as the post itself.
Frank Jacobs is Mapping Bloomsday in his Strange Maps blog at Big Think.
"This map is not much help in reconstructing that walk, but it does capture the elementary narrative structure of Ulysses. And it does so in that perennial favourite of schematic itineraries, Harry Beck’s London Underground map."
Ralph Luker kindly passed along this highly visual post by Lili Loufborrow writing at the Hairpin concerning women with books they're not reading in art. Mind you, El Greco's Penitent Magdalen has one heck of a Golgotha paperweight blocking her view. I suspect that Christiane Inman's 2009 Forbidden Fruit: A History of Women and Books in Art , described as "a history of women's literacy, and the social forces that often opposed it", may offer a helpful corollary for those with interest in pursuing this topic further.
The History of England gets a fix on the Anglo Saxon World View. I was particularly struck by the following citation attributed to Louise C., participating in a discussion at Historum Forum;
'A mappa mundi is a depiction of the world as a place of experiences, of human history, of notions and knowledge. It's more like an encyclopedia. It's certainly not - and was never intended to be - a chart to be followed by travellers"
History and the Sock Merchant explores Dejima: the 'Deep Space Nine' of Feudal Japan that was "the single place of direct trade and exchange between Japan and the outside world during the Edo period (1603 - 1868)."
"The volunteers I was working with started turning up some startling items amid the field reports and correspondence—pulp magazines from the 1930s, newspaper clippings with headlines straight out of the era of yellow journalism, and gruesome photos of dead bodies...And what a story it turns out to be! It has everything you’d expect (and wouldn’t expect!) from a Smithsonian expedition to tropical seas—exotic islands, fascinating wild fauna, stout-hearted scientists, a love triangle, and, very likely, murder.."
Looks like excellent beach reading. In other mysterious museum news, Galt Museum & Archives blog has one concerning Miss Edith Kirk, an artist "who came from an influential family in Yorkshire, travelled to remote towns in western Canada and then settled in Lethbridge. We don’t know why she left England, nor how she would find herself in the far northern reaches of British Columbia. Trying to fill in the many gaps of her life is an interesting challenge."
ThinkShop explores Joris Ivens and the Legend of Indonesia Calling, a film about the struggle for Indonesian self determination after WII that few saw at the time but which had an impact that was felt by many.
"By the mid-1960s Indonesia Calling had become a film that had a growing following in Holland, long before it had an audience. This made it unique in the history of the cinema. In its symbolic form it intervened in the historical process, shaping memory and providing a site for the articulation of diametrically opposing approaches to the national, and indeed international, past. The facticity of the film become tangential to it most significant impact. The film as fact had been replaced by the film as signifier."
HSP's Hidden Histories takes us out on an uplifting note with selections from a useful but often underutilized historical resource: the 1850-1880 US Mortality Schedules. Alas for the likes of poor William Shuler, age 54 , who died in June of 1869 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Norriton Township, "while disinterring a dead body in {a} Cemetery, having a cut on his finger, had his blood poisoned, from which he died."
This concludes History Carnival 100, brought to you this month by the Roman numeral C, and respectfully submitted by your most humble and obedient servant, a sometimes Continental in the recreated 1st New Jersey Regiment who on occasion even manages to go Walking the Berkshires. The History Carnival returns in August and you could be the host! Trust me, Sharon makes it easy and it's much more fun than your viva or junior prom ever were.
The rest of you may submit nominations here or follow along on Twitter (@historycarnival). Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see a man about a ray gun. I'm leaving the Brown Bess at home for my next reenactment. Consider this my warning to the British, à la Palin's Revere; "You are not going to take our atomic pistols!"
I wrote here in the Lakeville Journal about the Mountain Lion that was struck and killed by a car in Milford, CT, among other incipient arrivals in western New England. Fair use excerpt:
"The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection is working on the standard hypothesis that this was an illegally held captive animal that somehow got loose, perhaps wandering over from New York, as the eastern mountain lion is officially extinct outside of the Florida panther subspecies.
Preliminary investigation of the specimen, however, confirmed that it had not been neutered or declawed and was a lean animal, which does not strengthen that hypothesis, so they are waiting for DNA tests.
Moose have been known to wander to Long Island Sound, but it is hard to imagine a viable population of cougars becoming established on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. The western mountain lion, however, visits backyard swimming pools and overlaps with encroaching development in the wildland/urban interface. They are expanding their ranges east and, like the coyote before them, it is only a matter of time before a few of these big cats wander into our region (if, indeed, they have not already done so).
Wildlife officials often say that if we had mountain lions here, there would be physical evidence from collisions with cars. There is one such example of that now, and it will be very interesting to learn whether this was truly someone’s pet or a long-ranging pioneer from Illinois and points west."
Last night the twilight lingered long past 9:00. I stepped outside into the warm evening air and instead of turning toward the street I headed into the backyard and out to the gardens that face the meadow. It is not a large field, less than two acres on the assessor's map and further reduced by boundary incursions from various neighbors. The rank grass and remnants of wild apple trees slope into wet meadow before reaching the neighbors on the far side. It is flanked on the west and south by a screen of mature trees. The elderly owner of the field lives in Kansas but grew up here, and she keeps it undeveloped because of the fringed gentian she remembers from her childhood. There are very few of these flowers left in the field, but it is prime firefly habitat, and on Midsummer's Eve they were out in great profusion.
I have watched them in early summer ever since moving here in 2002. Cold evenings dampen their glow, but warm nights with the mist rising send them wisping through the air, over the tassels of uncut grass and through the branches of the apple trees. A few outliers may venture into the shadows of my garden but they avoid the lawns and other managed places, and when the field is cut their dance is done. Every year I hope that the mower will be delayed, that the old man with the tractors who lays the grasses down to maintain the owner's claim will postpone his passes through the field so the fireflies will linger.
This is a timed event, like sap rising in Spring and wild geese heading south in September. My garden path ends at a wrought iron gate with nothing but magic and wonder in the rank meadow beyond. I am loathe to leave when the faeries dance under the hazy stars. Long may they return.
