Track To The Marsh (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD

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13 April finds Fred and me, glad of our hipwaders, walking along the track into Fairmile Wetland, north of the Rideau River, off the old Highway 16. Our mission is to collect Leopard Frog eggs, and find a painting spot, of course. We went in here in 2004 to find breeding Leopard Frogs. This time, once we got past the deeply trenched and flooded right of way and all the devastation wrought by machines clearing roadways for a planned housing development, everything was much the same.

Nature keeps things the way they should be. The old ATV track is there, where the hunters go in deer season, the tracks filled with clear water and fallen leaves. A ground beetle swims across a flooded rut. The water is clear and the untouched bottom is lined with last year's fallen leaves.  The ferns push up from mossy beds and the trees stand in the wet places with water-soaked, mossy bottoms to their trunks.  Some of them are still arched like bows from the ice storm of 1997. Deer tracks in a muddy spot are accompanied by miniature deer tracks.

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