The Changing Seasons

Our sunroom offers a beautiful view of the woods behind our house. We cannot help but take pictures from the windows and we have many of them. As I was looking through them a few days ago I was struck at how the different seasons each posses their own unique beauty. When we first moved in, the view look like this:



If you look really hard you can see my dad and A, our youngest. They were looking for the rabbits that live just over that hill.

Here is the picture postcard perfect image we saw that weekend in February when we had more than 6 inches of snow. It was so breathtaking we spent most of the weekend looking out the windows.
Here is the view from the sunroom now. Its hard for me to believe it is the same woods we looked at all winter because it looks so different.

In fact, the woods are all around our house. We are literally "in" the woods, as it completely surrounds the house. And because the house is in a clearing, it grows very thick right around the house. So thick, in fact that we could no longer see the dog house turned chicken coop from the house. We decided we needed to clear some of the smaller trees and brush so that we could see the girls. As you can see in the picture below, though we took out over 30 small trees, we barely made a dent in our little woods.


We decided to keep the trees since they were all quite tall and straight. I figure we can use them for a decorative fence for a cutting garden or, if I don't get around to that, we can always burn them next winter. We've also cut down a few larger trees and plan to cut a few more. We are cutting them to size and saving them in our wood pile for next winter as well.

And yes, I am sore. All the time. It feels great!!