Nature always helps, casualties and survivors.

My brother's funeral today, far away, and I decided to mark it with a morning at the Preserve, walking and thinking and noticing. 

I had a first ever sighting, of a young red fox, galloping down the trail toward me until he noticed me and vanished like magic into the trees.  He was limping badly,and I wondered how he'd come by the injury. 

Not my first sight of a fox -- usually they're in parking lots, where they've discovered dumpsters and foolish humans who offer to feed them -- but in the real wilderness, and looking a lot better than his parking lot cousins, despite the limp.

Recent massive storms have broken a lot of old trees, and lifted some giants clean out of the ground. 

This is a sample of the kind of twisting damage done by high winds, more and more common here.  I didn't venture further into the beechwood, in case a late falling tree put paid to me.  There were some, in the interior, maybe a hundred feet tall, lying flat, their roots completely in the air.

And then there were little survivors like this miniature butterfly about half an inch across, on the wildflowers.  He was leaving as I clicked, so he's a blur of activity.  Which about sums him up, probably.

Nice way to spend a difficult morning.  I woke this morning at 6 a.m., the time the funeral was taking place in a different time zone. So this walk seemed appropriate, to mark the day.