Relaxing in the woods

Whew! I’m glad that’s over.

"That" is the annual Christian music very-hard-rock Purple Door festival that happens each August at Roundtop. Hours of listening to young people screaming into microphones is not my idea of a relaxing weekend. And I do mean screaming. Even though the cabin was a couple of hundred yards away from the nearest stage, the music was so loud on Friday night that I had to watch TV with the closed-captioning on.

Fortunately, Sunday was a better day. I stuck my nose out of the burrow of the cabin where I’d been hiding and came out for a walk. Summer has finally arrived at Roundtop, long overdue as it is, since Labor Day is fast approaching.

Perhaps I took my walk at just the right the right time of the morning to see a lot of activity, or perhaps the animals, like me, were just coming out of cover after the events of the weekend. For whatever reason, I saw and found some interesting things, certainly enough to blog about for most of the rest of the week.

So what did I see? The first signs of fall color in the Virginia creeper and a first non-flyover sighting of a double-crested cormorant, a box turtle and an assortment of frogs, to name a few. An hour’s walk in the woods made the music festival feel already long gone. Thank heaven for that.