A Winter Thaw at Trail Wood

Trail Wood #13.09 by Earl Plato

Trail Wood - Ed & Nellie Teale - Spring Is Coming
“ Nellie and I roam over one pasture after another. We tread across a sodden carpet of faded grass that has replaced the snow. We watch combing the soggy ground crows and starlings picking among grass clumps and investigating the remnants of drifts, snapping up bits of food exposed by he melting of the snow. Again we look down on the winding tunnels of meadow mice. We see them three-sided, “on the half-shell” with their roofs removed.
It is when we come to the bridge where the lane crosses Hampton Brook that we encountr the most dramatic efect of this sudden release of water. The sream is tumbling over the rocks in flood stage, patches and islands of foam veering and bobbing, small ice cakes jostling together in the millrace of te current. Where the current reaches the opening under the great slap of rock that supports the traffic of the lane, it piles up into a churning, whitling, roaring maelstrom that gnaws into the stream banks and lifts its crest almost to the level of the roadway. Far into the night we hear this uproar of the floodwater that a single dy of anormal warmth has brought forth from the crystalline substance of h silent snow.”
Writer’s note: On that August day a few years ao we drove over a small stream. That was Hampton Creek! I could see on the right bank the ravages of a spring torrent. Yes, I love Teale’s Trail Wood.