Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
A white sky at mid-morning beginning to glow as the clouds thin, while below in the meadow the white snakeroot is beginning to bloom. I find a dogwood sawfly larva from a later instar than yesterday’s fluffy white grubs; this is a proper green caterpillar crawling across my shirt.
Overcast and cool. When I tire of feeding myself to the mosquitoes, I don a bug hat and go into the yard with my phone to identify whatever has been skeletonizing trees and shrubs: angle-lined prominent moth caterpillars on the bigtooth aspen, pinstriped in green but too hairy to be extra twigs, and dogwood sawfly larvae on the silky dogwoods, curled into fat white moons.