Virginia Pine Cone

At 3:00 when we headed out it was 36 degrees and getting colder. Brrr... Daisy and I warmed up by hiking straight uphill into the mowed kudzu field, over the top of the hill. It's amazing how warm you become when hiking steeply uphill! We headed down the steep, old road to where there once was a small dam and a pond, at the headwaters of Meetinghouse Creek. On the way down we were in the shade, where the morning's ice crystals still jutted from banks of red clay. We left the road and hopped down the steep bank to the creek, following its winding bank all the way through Coon Hollow (named by me because of all the raccoon tracks we always found in the sand there), past two sunny pipelines, to the last, where Daisy and I finally settled in the sun to warm up. I'd been attracted to the daisy-like pinecone on this branch and picked it up, along with a deer vertebra, and some river birch bark. I thought I would draw all three, but when the sun dropped below the pines on the hill above us, all good intentions of "sticking with it" even in the cold, left with the sunlight. It immediately turned miserably cold. We immediately headed for home!