Arabia Mountain, after the storm

 The woods around Arabia Mountain were full of fallen trees. We got out for a 3-mile hike after the winter storm passed through.

What I took for one enormous tree was actually two. A big pine, uprooted, fell onto another, bringing both down.

I was surprised by the damage. I had noticed the cold — temperatures dropped to 18 degrees in Stone Mountain — more than the wind, although the tarp came off my woodpile. I’d noticed the cold because the Wise Woman is a gardener and had been worried about plants in the greenhouse and under wraps.

Daffodils and camellias were blooming around the neighborhood before the hard freeze.

The storm took down a lot of old, dead limbs in the forest. The green in the woods now is mainly laurel greenbriar, Smilax laurifolia, a briar that will climb anything. With so much brown in the forest in late winter, the bright green leaves must have been like grocery ads to ancient peoples, who dug up the rhizomes for food.

A beautiful sight: One greenbriar climbed into a red maple, which was covered in little red flowers. The deep greens and fiery reds were lovely against a blue sky.