“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” – Aldo Leopold in Marshland Elegy.

With that thought in mind, I headed out this afternoon to Heyward’s Meadow, a small marsh near Walden Pond. By the time I got there, the morning sun had given way to thickening clouds. It was a cold, bleak, apparently lifeless landscape, and deliciously peaceful. There were no signs of animal activity I could see, until I spotted this recently gnawed tree near the water’s edge.