Fresh Air

The great outdoors. These past few days it really has been great to be outdoors. At the risk of jinxing spring, I'm declaring it has arrived.

Our first venture into the wild was with our Roots&Shoots groups. We had a wonderful work day at Ted Stone Forest, a Cook County Forest Preserve. It turned out to be a surprisingly nice day, after a damp and dismal morning. We did hard raking work of charcoal from the burned brush piles. The kids (and moms) made smaller piles of the charcoal to be re-burned. The work was difficult because it has been so wet and some of these burn circles were mud pits.

Then we spread seed throughout the newly cleared areas, so woodland grasses will grow where once buck thorn thrived. The kids had a great day, worked hard, played hard and managed to find two skulls and an old rusty spring. And I hope they understand what a difference they are making to the health of this ecosystem.

Mark and I then took the boys on a frog monitoring session at part of the vast Palos Forest Preserves, also in Cook County. It's a long hike with the kids in the dark, but mostly an easy one as the wetlands are close to the driveways. Our daughter was off on a Girl Scouts overnight, so she missed this one, but had adventures of her own. We heard many chorus frogs like this one, a few leopard frogs and a whole lot of spring peepers (below).

We heard the frogs as soon as we got out of the car, and the sun had just set. They were loud all the way by the road. As we walked back the sound got louder and then faded as we passed several colonies in the various wet spots. The kids had fun with the flashlights and helped to identify the different calls, listening hard for early leopard frogs, which were being drowned out by the peepers and chorus frogs.


The next day we picked up Little Missy and headed for my parents house on the beach in Indiana. Driving into their community, we heard a whole lot of frogs calling in the middle of the day. It made us wonder how many times we've just driven past with our windows up without noticing. It has been a very wet winter and early spring, so there may just be more frogs out there. But I'd like to believe that our heightened awareness of the frogs is helping us to see what was always there.

The beach was great. The temperature was in the 60s, although only the little ones ventured into the water to their knees. We didn't think of sunscreen, so our skin is a little pinker, but our souls are much calmed after two hours of beach time.

Now I'm struggling to fight off the urge to declare it summer, spend our days poking around in the woods and forget all our obligations.