Saturday, January 06, 2007

Winter, Schminter

Dateline: January 5, 2007
I've officially given up on seeing snow. Today was a balmy 55 degrees and sunny, barely a cloud in the sky, so Ev and Lori-Fred spent a few hours driving the Ohio River Scenic Byway and snapping photos with Lori-Fred's nifty new camera.
Our first stop was just outside of Grand Chain at the widest bend in the Ohio River, where we stood awhile and watched the pretty barges go by.
Our next stop was this old abandoned house between Cypress and Belknap. We've driven by it frequently and we're fascinated by it. It sits all alone in a sea of farm fields, and you come upon it around a bend in the road. Who did it belong to? What did it look like before it looked like this? Why are so many of these beautiful old houses abandoned until they gently lower themselves to the ground? This house has beautiful lines and was obviously someone's pride and joy at one time. I love the woodwork on the gables. This is one of those houses we drive by and we both say, "Ooooh! Fixer-upper!" simultaneously.
A little further up the road to Cypress we came to the Section 8 Nature Preserve ... which is either a public housing site or you'd have to be crazy to wander around in here. It's part of the Cache River Wetlands area ... or, as Ev and Lori-Fred call it ... the schwamp! Here you will find bald cypress, tupelo, several varities of oak and, surprisingly, elms which apparently survived the Great Dutch Elm Epidemic that eradicated most of the elm trees in the country ... and virtually all of them in the midwest. These were apparently hiding out. I would never have thought of myself as a swamp afficianado, but I find them much more alluring than I could have imagined. Besides, there's a cute lesbian who works at the Cache River Interpretive Center and we like to drop by there and debate which of us she's hot for when we're in the neighborhood. : )

Our last stop was close to home. We'd planned to stop in at Weaver's Country Store and buy some homegrown meat and tasty stuff from the nice Mennonite family who own it, but we were a few minutes past closing. We took a little side road and came across this family pond complete with a beach. Apparently if you don't watch TV or engage in other worldly wasters of time you can accomplish a lot of outdoor projects!

So, January in Southern Illinois looks an awful lot like Spring in Southern Illinois this year, doesn't it?
Stay tuned for more Adventures of Ev and Lori-Fred in Little Egypt ...
Kwach


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the first winter since we moved to NY that I didn't get to enjoy the sight of the outside Christmas lights shining up through several inches of snow.

Today they got packed away for another year.

And the tulips are coming up.

Kwach said...

On the news the other night they were showing people joggin in Central Park in shorts ... and some community swimming pools that were doing a good business.

The other day we noticed a tree that was covered with leaf buds.

Whasssssup with this??

Ev said...

I blame Bush. :-)