The Old Sawmill Landscape Today
This piece of land which abuts the North East River in the far distance for a long while during WWII and for some years after was known locally as The Sawmill. Here many thousands of board feet of oak and pine lumber were sawn and sold of which built many an older home in North East and surrounding area. When I was a child in the '30s my parents would come here to what they and others called the 'Ball Diamond' where many a baseball game had been played and pick wild Strawberries in profusion, by the bucket-full, both to preserve and to sell to supplement their meager income in those hardship days of the Great Depression. Today if you walk through the field, the stunted forest and marshy areas near the river you see mounds of trash in profusion but no strawberries. And you also see numerous monitoring well pipes driven to sample the unknown pollution of those days of heedless destruction of nature by things like the saw mill and a county with no such things as landfills and recycling for the trash generated by a slowly growing community.
The Fruit Ball of the Sycamore Tree - Platanus orientalis
The flowers of the Sycamore appear in spring and develop into fuzzy, round fruiting balls
that hang on long stems like Christmas ornaments. They darken and ripen
in October. Within each ball are tiny, seed-like fruits that disperse in
downy tufts like daffodil fluff, as the balls disintegrate.
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