Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I went for a walk this afternoon, because getting outside in the daylight is good for me, especially on bright sunny days like this afternoon. I saw this cherry tree two blocks from home:

( tree, behind a cut for size )

I live in an inner suburb of Boston, and wasn't expecting to see flowers other than some vagrant dandelions.

ETA: I am reliably informed that this looks like a winter-flowering cherry, and they're supposed to do that.

I visited adrian_turtle last weekend, partly just because and partly to provide practical and moral support because she'd been rear-ended while driving earlier that week. The practical support included a couple of loads of laundry; the moral support included tea, conversation, and snuggling. On Saturday we went to a party, with games and latkes and such; I got in a four-handed game of Scrabble and a couple of rounds of Fluxx and then decided it would make sense to go home before I was worn out. I realized after I got home Sunday night that all three days had felt delayed, in various ways; some plan-changing and extra bus trips on my way over to Adrian's Friday; delays getting up, out, and to lunch on Saturday; and an annoying 40 minutes waiting for a bus in the rain on my way back to South Station Sunday. But Adrian and I were also closer to being on the same schedule than usual (I tend to wake up early), which was pleasant.

When I got back to Inwood, I saw that we have five new street trees along Isham Street, in spaces prepared in the concrete some weeks ago. They all have numerical tags; two of the five also have "One in a million" labels tags with the name of the tree written on them. The tags say those two are American elms. I am surprised and pleased. (Elsewhere, I've seen trees labeled Zelkova (also elm genus) and hackberry.)

I now have enough hats. I tend to lose hats, not so much the way other people lose gloves as putting them down on park benches, tables at diners, buses, and such. Sometimes I find nice hats to replace them: one of the nicest hats I've lost was one I bought in Paris to replace one that I seem to have left near the Eiffel Tower. (The replacement was left behind after a meal during Minicon a few years ago.) So, Adrian just got me eight hats. That's enough that I can shove a hat in a coat pocket and not miss it when wearing a different coat (I had thought I'd lost my magenta "turtle fur" hat and it turns out it was in my parka). It's also enough that if/when I lose one, I can just grab another. These are plain hats (mostly black, but one each in purple, gray, and white), and all eight fit into a gallon zip-lock bag.

I am in the middle of too many books, in part because I was close enough to the end of Golden Witchbreed that I wanted a fresh book to take with me this weekend. And one of my library books is due December 24, two-week loan instead of three, and not renewable, because it's relatively new. I will start that as soon as I finish at least one of the current books.

I went to the gym after work, and had a decent workout.
( numbers, as usual )

I was just out in the park after the rain, just enjoying looking around and walking in sunlight after days of gray and wet. The park, and the city as a whole, is still incredibly green, enough so that for the last week or so cattitude and I have been saying "It's still all green" as we walk to the subway in the morning This isn't quite true: here and there is yellow of a tulip tree, or a single oak going red-brown while the rest are still summer green. The Virginia creeper is brilliant red, and the ailanthus are all yellow. But we're pointing out individual bits of color on a green background, not a pattern of reds and yellows.

There aren't a lot of ailanthus here. What there's a lot of is the oaks, the hickory, the maple and tulip trees, and the firs. A few willows down by the river, which are quietly dropping leaves on windy days. Green leaves, not yellow. Birch trees in the hilly bits.

There's one tree in front of our building that always turns early, and that is coming up red, as always, but later than its usual. There are lush green lawns, grass and clover and late dandelion. Green reeds in the salt marsh. The maples are still green, and the ginkgos and locusts. The hawthorns are gorgeous from 20 or 30 or 50 meters away, green leaves above a hazy redness of berries. Day by day, it's pleasant, but this is late for it to look and feel like early autumn. I don't know if it's all going to go "whump" like a cartoon on November 1, or if it will flow as usual, but later.

A fortnight ago, I was walking downtown with Cattitude on our way back from dinner, looked idly at a street tree and then said "wait a minute." Two Callery pear trees, in bloom, as if it was April. I suppose that fits a year that started with ornamental cherries blooming in Chinatown in January, before it really got cold.

Memo to self: climate is a long-term average. Weather is what actually happens, day by day.

The ornamental cherries in Columbus Park are in bloom.

Not one or two stray flowers: branches covered with small white blossoms, on several different trees.

Columbus Park is in Chinatown, where cattitude and I were walking after eating lunch, thinking in terms of buying some roast meat for tonight's dinner. We were at Bayard and Mulberry when I noticed the flowers. We crossed the street, and saw that yes, there really were flowers (not dried-out leaves or an illusion), many of them. Mostly of the cherry trees are protected by fencing or boulders, but Cattitude was able to reach one flowering branch and pull it down enough for me to touch the soft petals.

A few other people were paying attention to the flowers; most of the people in the park were either playing basketball, eating lunch, or standing in a circle around, I assume, some sort of event that we couldn't see.

I'd been thinking of getting tangerine sorbet already, and the cherries decided it. So there I was, in my old down jacket, eating sorbet and thinking about flowers, with my beloved. A few hours earlier, we'd been discussing the last few green leaves on the honey locust trees in Inwood Hill Park, and noticing that the leaves on the jimson weed were showing signs of last night's freeze, the first of the season.

There's a tree on the corner of 218th Street and Park Terrace West that's looked half-dead for a long time. It's gnarled, not very tall, and looks as though it once had two trunks, one of which has been cut off near the ground.

All of a sudden, it's in bloom, and has been for the last week. By "all of a sudden," I mean that neither cattitude nor I can remember seeing it bloom before, and we've lived here since 1987. I didn't recognize the flowers, and couldn't find them in my tree identification book, but the Web came to the rescue, and then I pulled out the tree book again, looked in the index, and there it was. We appear to have a northern catalpa, Catalpa speciosa, though not the large, spreading tree that many of them are.

I do wonder whether we've somehow managed never to walk down that block during the relevant week or two of Spring, or whether this tree had been ill and has now recovered. Either way, it's very pretty, and attracting bumblebees (who also have roses and irises and lots of other flowers in the adjacent garden).

There's a stand of young American chestnuts on a ridge in Georgia.

"There's something about this place that has allowed them to endure the blight," said Nathan Klaus, a biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who spotted the trees. "It's either that these trees are able to resist the blight, which is unlikely, or Pine Mountain has something unique that is giving these trees resistance."

Experts say it could be that the chestnuts have less competition from other trees along the dry, rocky ridge. The fungus that causes the blight thrives in a moist environment.

The largest of the half-dozen or so trees is about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old, and is believed to be the southernmost American chestnut discovered so far that is capable of flowering and producing nuts.

The American Chestnut Foundation hopes to breed these trees into its existing project of crossing the very few known surviving American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts to produce blight resistance, and then back-crossing to get as close to a pure American chestnut as possible.

juliansinger offered to pick a letter for anyone who asked, and then we're supposed to pick ten things that start with that letter, and write about them and what they mean to us.

She gave me T. I started by listing some things, and then selected from them based on what I felt ready to write about. This proved trickier than I thought it would be (lots of T's in that sentence, but not ones I want to use) and the results may be more free-associative than was being asked for.( cut because it got quite long )