Awaka'siki'somm, three days before full moon

I paid a visit to my phenology site this morning.

Time seems to be in a sticky mood, like molasses. Other than a multitude of cawing crows, which stay out of my earshot, no one seems to be particularly active. While there lies a layer of already browned leaves on the forest floor to rustle as animals pass through, most of the leaves in the different stories of the forest remain persistently green, with few yellowing exceptions (sarsaparilla, aspen, and crap apple). Layer on to that an atmosphere that refrains from making breezes or gusts, so I witness no falling leaves, or swirls of already fallen leaves. The creek is low, and in some places moving so slowly as to appear still. One such bend of the creek has collected those domes of foam that float down the creek, but in this still spot rather than gathering into a mass against an obstacle like a fallen log, they spread out to become individual streaks, white slivers separated by black/brown slivers of shallow water, painting the creek in static lines that remind me of shattered glass. Downstream, leaves are similarly placed thickly on the water's surface without being carried away, and upstream, a few eddies in the current anticipate its cessation. An eerie feeling to go alongside the disconcerting visual arises in my belly, as though time itself were stagnating and draining away into an invisible vortex.

Elsewhere, one crap apple tree gives a happy, vibrant, tricolour of green and yellow leaves and bright red tiny apples, all still hanging on to their stems. Red clover flower heads are transforming from purplish petals to brown seed packets. A syrphid fly lands on my shoulder to accompany me on my walk for a time. I spend some time with my bare feet in the silt the creek deposited in one of kin's meanders, and hear a few soft bird seep calls that I cannot identify to species.