Down in the hollow this morning, everything just looked wet and muddy. It wasn’t until I stepped out on the porch and looked up that I saw the ice. The house and mud is at about 1350 feet above sea level. Here I’m looking from the garden spot toward the north rim of the hollow, which is about 1500 feet elevation. Just that small difference in height and the trees have ice.

I took the following photos in the vicinity of our mailbox on the county road at an elevation of about 1525 feet. The pines and cedars were especially weighted down, but there were also a few branches down off hardwoods. Please be advised that I don’t know how to photograph ice, and these are evidence of that.

Shrek saw this on the hillside behind the barn and got my attention. We carried it down to the woodpile. Interesting how animals have been gnawing on the antlers.

The Yellow One and I just had our hourly ten minute walk down to the property line on the old wagon road. To be honest, it took us the full ten minutes just to reach this spot, so if your drinking beer with my surgeon tonight, ask him if it’s allowed. This old wagon road was the only way into the hollow when Milton Masters built his first home here in 1928 or so. The road runs along the south and west side of the creek in the bottom of the hollow until it all opens onto the larger Haverly Hollow. After that, I really don’t know how the road ran, though I’m told it joined Rockhouse Road. It’s the kind of question I would ask Wells McCall if possible. As you see, my sign has been down awhile. It had some help from an idiot human, possibly the same idiot human who stole the game camera near here a year ago. Or not. There’s no shortage of idiot humans here or in Texas or anywhere else on earth. The game camera was a gift from my brother-in-law, so I hated to have lost it for that reason alone, but an Arkansas Master Naturalist was using it in an informal study of local wildlife. It was stolen around deer season, which is when these things generally happen.

After a couple days of rain, the yellow dog and I again circled the old pond. The spring above was running strong and has the pond as full of water as possible. It’s a beautiful sight indeed. If it would again reliably hold water, I would clean up some of that brush.

For at least our first decade in the hollow, we had a nice little spring-fed pond up on the side of the hill. It wasn’t much of a pond, but it always held water and every year like clockwork a pair of ducks came and nested. Then a multiyear drought hit us, the worst in the Arkansas Ozarks since the dustbowl, and the pond slowly disappeared. If ducks came to nest, they did not stay. Today I stood in the bottom of the dry pond and lamentations filled my mind.