A LITTLE DEW

Frost aster, so named because it is one of the last plants to remain in flower—even surviving through multiple light frosts. Because of this tenacity, it's an important source of pre-winter food for various insects, including wasps and bees.   

On the face of it, dew is nothing more than water droplets formed by atmospheric moisture condensing on various surfaces as they lose heat. Dew occurs when moisture forms at a rate faster than it can evaporate. Should the temperature fall below a certain point, the dew becomes frost.

A few minutes after my arrival, the morning's dew had all but disappeared from this clump of big bluestem—though you can see a few droplets on the seeds and stems, one nicely sunlit.

Autumn is the year's best time for dew formation. In turn, it's one of my favorite times for making photos, because a bit of dew on the even the most mundane, commonplace object—such as grass stems or strands of a spider's web—is at once dressed with a sparkling touch of jeweled magic.

Tiny dew droplets strung like transparent pearls along the fine strands of a diminutive web. 

A morning walk through an old field, along the edge of a wood or stream, will afford a thousand possible images to record. Of course, given the ephemeral nature of dew, your photographic time is fleeting and seldom endures long enough for you to barely scratch the surface of available possibilities.

Sunlight shining through dew-cloaked Indian grass almost looks like frost. 

That was the case this morning…I only had about fifteen minutes in which to snap away like mad before the rising sun raised the dew point, and the tiny droplets which had enacted their transformation on the everyday, suddenly evaporated into thin air.  

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SIMPLE SATURDAY MORNING

Saturday morning along the river. On the hill above the cottage, the rising sun is climbing through my neighbor’s towering sycamore. The air is cool and damp, sweet.

Moon the dog and I amble up the drive to the road so I can look in the mailbox, because I can’t remember checking it last evening. Nope, nothing inside. Which still doesn’t tell me whether I retrieved whatever there was yesterday, or forgot and the box is empty simply because nothing was delivered.

Either way, I’m probably losing my mind.

The grass wears a silver sheen of dew. It is still a deep, luscious green. Here and there tiny water droplets sparkle like diamonds on velvet.

In a shadowy corner along the fenceline, a few tattered leaves hang suspended in a bit of sun, illuminated as if by a spotlight. Without the dramatic lighting those leaves wouldn’t merit a second glance. And yet now, momentarily, they’re quite captivating—made special by the light.

Isn’t that so often the case with us? Aren’t we all sometimes uplifted, transformed, made special by a certain setting and the power of an outside source? Love, for example—when it is good—brightens and inspires, raises us up, restores, empowers.

We can all always become so much more than the plain old mundane us when transfigured by an outside light.

Back at the cottage, I stand on the bank and watch the river’s moving mirrored surface scatter and swirl the pinkish morning sunlight. I never tire of seeing the interplay of light and current.

Moving water has always captivated me in a way that water stilled never manages. Not that a lake or pond can’t be astonishingly lovely. But they don’t speak to me the way moving water does; streams are alive, fellow travelers. Creeks and rivers, brooks and rills seem possessed of their own restless spirit…a feeling I know well.

Seasonal change is afoot here along the river—though there’s not yet much to see other than a few clumps of yellow-brown leaves distributed here and there amongst the otherwise still-green foliage of the sycamores.

The tiny quick hummingbirds are still hanging around. I keep expecting them to vanish any day—and they will, eventually, when whatever embedded bit of ruby-throat wisdom stirs and whispers its annual message—informing them the time to head south has arrived.

Not, however, on this sunny, blue-sky Saturday morning. The only thing moving onward today is the river….