Mostly, the things we need to know are right in front of us.

I observed some Coltsfoot jutting up through the sandstone cobbled creek bed we were exploring just the other day. Although it looks like Dandelion, it’s certainly not, producing flowers before any leaves, foregoing any notion of prudence and getting right into the good stuff, the exhausting stuff. The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers suggests that its habitat is roadsides and waste places. I will say that it did seem an anomaly thrusting up through the hot, sun beaten rocks on this early April shoreline. It stood small and burning as if plugged in to a hidden electrical outlet somewhere at the heart of the earth, against the young gray-stemmed Beech and and curly River Birch bark and tumbled conglomerate stones.

This mountain stream tumbles down from the flat topped deciduous swamps of hemlock, spruce and high-bush blueberry, frustratingly dense, the soggy Pennsylvania alpine where you could kneel down to eat teaberry from in between the cracks of rocky balds and mossy pillows, skirted on each side by old, thick clumps of winterberry holly. A water that was once still around deep roots now rushes by to drown out a typical springtime hum of chickadees and red-bellied woodpeckers thumping off beyond, roaring past the bursts of coltsfoot. But it is certainly no waste at all. Tussilago farfara rolls off the tongue just like a sweet surprise from some other bright place.

Right across the way on the bank of the old logging road we walk to get here I spot the Round Leaf Yellow Violet. A single little flower with a throat streaked in purple singing over a green rosette of leaves. Against the floor of brown leaves and Ladyfern still yet asleep, it is like a lantern glowing just above the duff. Black flies swarm it in tight haloes.

These woods we walk are here in deep valleys carved out of this ancient face, into which we can glimpse for a special moment, always going home.