Return to Lost Maples

  

Normally for me a return to a distant scenic place means the passage of years or at least months. Not this time: the November 27th visit to Lost Maples State Natural Area about 150 miles west-southwest of Austin proved so colorful and photographically fruitful that we went back the very next morning. We’d spent the night in Kerrville and were therefore only an hour away, not the three hours away we’d have been if we’d returned to Austin on the 27th. Being a Monday, the place wasn’t mobbed the way it had been on the weekend, so reserving an entrance permit was easy.

  

 

Here are four views of bigtooth maples, Acer grandidentatum, from that second-day-in-a-row visit, when we initially walked a part of the West Trail, where the stripe of color shown in the top picture caught my attention. The second photograph shows the glowy advantage of backlighting. In the third view, notice all the ball moss, Tillandsia recurvata.

   

 

While physicists make much of black holes, the last photograph is one of a bunch I took
showing how blue holes sometimes emerge in the midst of all the colorful foliage.

 

  

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Dictionary.com has chosen woman as its word of the year for 2022. You can read the reasons why, and in the process you’ll learn that the word in older English was the equivalent of wifeman*, where wife originally meant ‘female,’ whether married or not, and man was a generic term for ‘person,’ as in mankind and “Man does not live by bread alone.”

* In case you’ve ever wondered why the o in the plural women is pronounced like a short i, now you can see it’s a carry-over from the original form of the word. Why the first vowel in the singular form changed, I don’t know.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman