The Tangled Nest

This week we Seattle-ites experienced record high temperatures for the first week of June.  On one of those 90 degree evenings, Tom turned up all sweaty from his bike ride home and said, “I’m taking you girls to see some snow.”

We live at the top of our watershed, a couple miles uphill from Longfellow Creek, where our water drains.   A buffer of native trees hides the creekside trail from busy Delridge road, and along the creek grow Black Cottonwoods, as they have for centuries.  Coast Salish groups, including the Duwamish that live here, may have used the tree’s thick, wrinkly bark for water buckets, and their leaves as an antiseptic. In the early spring, the cottonwood buds lend their rich, vanilla fragrance to the air.  Now the seeds, covered in the soft fluff that helps to protect and disperse them, are falling like snow.  We’ve never seen so much of it.  Somehow, even in the heat, we felt cooled.  It was magical.

Blossoming thimbleberry covered in "snow"

The heat doesn't keep our neighborhood beaver from working...