A walk in Lancaster County.

This is the stuff within walking distance of my parents’ house in PA: Starbucks, Bergdorf Goodman, a barn filled with tobacco. (It has made a resurgence, probably in partial thanks to hipsters trying to smoke cigars like old men.) There are also giant oak trees, babbling brooks, cow-poo-scented fields for miles…

We walked around and, SmogLung here, tried to breathe in a year’s worth of grassy, treesy, green, earthy AIR.

An old farmhouse.

An Amish farmhouse. And a farmer workin’ his horses. Wanna sound like you’re from Lancaster? Pronounce that street ee-bee CHICK-eez.

Oh, and lang-kiss-tur.

Look what I find on the ground! Little puffy harbingers of Autumn…

I’m a hideous wildlife photographer. Anything that’s moving at the speed of animals is a problem for me. (See above.) BUT. Yay! WOOLLY BEAR CATERPILLARS!

I just Wikipedia’d this guy and learned a bunch of stuff I didn’t know: I spell it wrong, it’s actually the larvae of a moth…gross – I let it touch meeee. His brown/black patches tell you how the winter’s gonna go this year. By the looks of this fella, a mild winter’s on its way (tiny black patches, big brown patch).

In PA, we like to use odd animals to predict weather. (Hi-five, P. Phil.)

I tried — a lot of times — to take a picture of this Woolly Bear as my mustache. One looked like a blurry photo of Hitler. One was a little bit Frida Kahlo… I gave up.

XX,

L

Tags: amish, barn, lancaster county, tobacco, woolly bear caterpillar