There’s both a quaking bog and a marsh nearby, but we visit the marsh much more often simply because it’s closer. Yesterday, I got up at dark-thirty and worked my way through a breakfast meeting, advance responses to student drafts, figuring out storage solutions for the coming onslaught of diss-related website PDFs, doing some actual research, and a pile o' email. So when Mister Husband appeared in my study at 4 and suggested heading out to the marsh and then Chinese for dinner, I got right up and put on my shoes.

Some of the boardwalk needs repairs or is nearly submerged, but there’s a good stretch that’s pretty new. The marsh has a different beauty this time of year, a more muted range of color splotched with bright leaves and brilliant green duckweed. There’s always a lot of texture there, but I see even more of it in the fall. Usually there are geese and ducks and herons, but nobody was stirring yesterday. It was just the two of us tromping along the boards, and eventually hurrying back under the first raindrops.