sensitive feet, sensitive fern

This morning did not start off well. Two words: plantar fasciitis. A first for me. For those of you who aren’t runners, this is when the band of tissue along the bottom of your foot becomes inflamed, no doubt due to the runner foolishly never stretching and having racked up too many miles, too quickly, for 1/2 marathon #2 of the season, just a week and two days away from now, but who’s counting.
The symptom of PF is, you wake up at 5:45 am for a quick pee, stand up, and feel like someone drove a nail up through your heel. Yeah, that was my introduction to the day.
Things improved: it was a Reiki-at-the-hospital day, and I worked with a woman who, though interested in the general idea of being connected to healing energy, hates having people touch her. “Just not my thing,” she confessed. “No problem!” answered I. “I’ll do a distant healing on you.” So I squirreled myself away in a spare room and sent her a treatment from 20 feet away with a wall between us. VICTORY!
And then I hung out with a friend who is even more nuts about Nature than I am (in the sense that she is not content to visit her wild flora friends. She eats them. She had milkweed shoots for dinner the other night.) She was happy to accompany me on my usual dawdling mailbox run.
I spotted something I have always longed to see: the fertile fronds of sensitive fern when they are shiny and new and still green.VICTORY #2!



Rest assured, you’ll be seeing more of this guy in the coming weeks.
We seem to have a lot of hop hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana) right by the brook.

 
These are its fruits. Thank you, zoom lens!