Hello friends out there! Long time, no write! I didn’t meant to let June get away from me but this has been a busy summer. Most of it was planned out months ago as we had to figure out when Forest would spend his few weeks with grandparents. Due to various scheduling conflicts between two sets of grandparents + a summer vacation in July, it ended up being instead of two weeks back to back, once in June and once in July, single weeks spread out through June and July/August. Which has meant more driving back and forth for us to and from DFW. Such is life but I’m glad we and his grandparents can accommodate him coming to visit for long periods of time in the summer! And Forest loves it, especially when he gets to hang out with his cousins, so I’m glad it is now something of a summer ritual around here. That has meant a lot of busy weekends, trying to pack in time to hike and botanize/naturalize in between it all, plus working during the week. Chris managed a small house project in early June with painting our living room. It hadn’t been painted since we moved in 12 years ago and was in need of a freshen up. I’d honestly thought we’d make it through other house projects this summer, too, but the one week we could have done it didn’t pan out, though I did do a lot of gardening that week. And the other week ended up being one for a lot of grieving as Chris’ dad unexpectedly died two weeks ago. We didn’t find out until several days after and so the chaos of that situation has bled over into the weeks after. Paired with preparing for our upcoming trip, I haven’t felt much like writing here or anywhere. I’d also hoped to do more hiking this summer for my book and have only been able to carve out a bit here and there. Progress is progress but I would have liked more. I love/hate how busy the summers are right now. I think part of the busyness is nice for memory making and looking back upon in the future, but in the heat of it all it feels difficult to work through. There’s not enough time to “do it all” and all of the ideas I had on my list for the summer are quickly evaporating. I told Chris that next summer I wanted to take a week off from work and stay home and do things at home that a stay at home mom would normally do with their kid in the summer, like going to the pool and the museum and zoo…I want to do that with my kid before he’s a teen and not interested in doing these things! I got to enjoy a lot of that with my mom growing up because she didn’t work in the summers (for the most part) and as a working mom I have definitely felt like I’ve missed out on so much of that. Especially when he was a baby/toddler. I didn’t get to have any of those mommy and me groups. It was one of the most infuriating and isolating things about the early baby years because all of those groups met at like 10am on a Tuesday and they didn’t do shit on weekends. Not like I would have wanted to on every weekend anyway, between catching up on chores and sleep…but to have that option would have been nice. What else is up?? I’ve been gardening some. I worked on removing invasive Perilla frutescens from our right-of-way out front. It has slowly been becoming worse in that area over the last few years and I was tired of looking it so I started hand pulling it. It took several nights/hours to get it done but it looks good for now. I’m sure I’ll have to spot check it in the coming years. I also went through and removed invasive Scutelleria racemosa, South American skullcap, from one area of our front yard a few months ago and need to go back through and do it again. This last week I weeded most of the pathways in the edible/fenced garden, though will have to attend to more of that later this summer. At least the whole situation looks manageable again! As someone who was always a “summer person”, as I’ve aged I’ve become more reclusive in the summer than I used to. But I find if I make myself just go out and get sweaty and covered in dirt from gardening I end up feeling a lot better. Embrace the sweat! And I think it builds my heat tolerance up somewhat, too. Writing and art—not much on that front. I’m working through editing photos for my book and photos from our Spring Break trip to the Smokies. I’m still trying to figure out how to use this blog going forward. I miss writing as often as I used to but I can’t keep up with bloggers who write daily or even multiple times a week so I know I can’t expect people to keep up here. But then I’m also like, “Write for yourself, Misti” and that’s valuable because this is basically an archive of my life in some ways. I don’t know, it just feels a lot different than it used to. I need to do another book report here but that might not come until August. I have been reading a lot, or more than I was planning to this year. I’m currently in the middle of The Nineties which is about the ’90s of course, but a reflection on its cultural and political/historical value 30 years later. Obviously having lived through it I remember a lot of what the author writes and some of the details I read more about later because obviously at 11 I didn’t fully grasp the consequences of Ross Perot, but I’m enjoying the book so far. Especially because I know a lot of folks my age tend to look back nostalgically at the 80s and 90s when we’re dealing with everything now, but really the 90s gave us everything today. TV/Movie wise: I told myself I’d try to pull back on how much I was binge watching on streaming this summer and I have kicked it back a bit but I’m currently going through Dexter on Netflix. I recall watching one or two episodes in the past but never the full series. So I’m towards the tail end of the first season and am loving it so far. It makes me miss aspects of living in Miami a lot. In late May/early June I went through all of the Killing Eve episodes and loved, loved, loved that! Season 4 was a bit of a miss but the first three seasons were really great! And of course Bridgerton! But S3 was also a slight dud, too. I wish I could fill some of this time with reading but I find myself not being able to focus, especially in the evenings, and I enjoy zoning out to a show to decompress. I could also probably just go to bed… And that’s really about it. Life is very busy, Forest is growing like a weed (a quarter inch in June, apparently, according to my mom), and we’re trying to find time to get outside in between it all. My brain is full of creative projects that I don’t have time for/need to make time for. Oh, and don’t get me started on SCOTUS right now. Good god. The consequences of the 2000 election reverberate through time. I actually started thinking about alternatives to that election if Gore had won. We likely wouldn’t have had Obama in 08. I’m thinking it would have been 2001-2009 Gore, 2009-2013 McCain or maybe 2009-2017 depending on his health, and 2013/2017-2021/2025 Obama, likely not Biden as his VP, maybe Pete Buttigieg if it is 2017. We skip out on TFG in 2017 because no Obama and by the time Obama comes around later he’s too old and we all know what a shit head he is. I don’t know, but we can dream. What a different, and likely better, world we would be in now. Anyway, none of that matters. But it is nice to play make believe sometimes. Please comment and let me know how you are and what you are reading/watching and if you have any great hiking plans this summer!

Hello readers out there! The soggy Big Thicket Life has been very busy lately. I didn’t realize most moms/parents felt like May was a chaotic nightmare until I started seeing other mom’s posting memes about “Maycember” (all the business of the holidays but no presents) and the end of school and I feel very much seen. May zoomed by quickly and now it’s June 3rd and I can already see the end of summer because we have basically every single week planned out until the first day of school in early August. I know…it’s a lot. Forest has two summer camp weeks this year, compared to the three previous summers when he’s gone to the school district’s summer camp for the majority of the summer. This summer he’s spending a month at two sets of grandparents, spread out in one week sessions throughout the summer. Then we’re taking a significant vacation trip in July (more on that after the trip!) and a few short weeks and then school starts again. The other big item is: I’m writing a book! I mean, I have already written one book that I don’t know will ever be published (more on that in a minute), but I’m writing an actual book that *will* be published because I signed a contract with the University of Georgia Press to write a hiking guide to the Big Thicket ecoregion! It came about because I pitched the first book to the press (and many other presses) back in the fall and it turns out I’d missed my opportunity for that book with UGA because they’d just signed another trail memoir the week before. Drat! But the editor emailed back asking if I was interested in doing any kind of hiking guide for Florida, which I had to reply back and let him down to not only was I not living in Florida any longer but I personally knew the people who write the majority of the hiking guides for the Florida Trail/Florida. Then I casually pitched an generic east Texas hiking book, possibly a Houston hiking book, knowing that it was likely to fall flat because Texas isn’t that close to Georgia. Well, it turns out they had acquired a smaller hiking press, Milestone Press, a few years ago and were looking to add to their list and not only that but UGA and Texas A&M and UT were all in the same college sports conference now so it was much more feasible that Texas and Georgia were connected now. So, I took a few months to put together a book proposal, finally settling on the Big Thicket region because the last book published about the BT was well over a decade ago and most of the people who wrote any of the books on the Big Thicket are dead or very old. Then they took a few months to review it and approve it with their group and then sent me a contract, which I mulled over for another two months and talked to some authors I know about it. I mean, this isn’t a money making venture here! I suppose it could be if I didn’t have a full-time job and was actually constantly working on books of some sort, but it doesn’t take much looking to see that traditional publishing is a very difficult industry to make a living. There’s no big advance check coming my way—no advance check in fact! So, I’ll be hitting y’all up on pre-orders sometime in 2026 so I can make those teeny royalties and maybe earn back some gas money! I’m only half jesting–it’s a slog but one that I’m enjoying and knowing full well where I stand with the book. Plus, I get to hike and write about trails, which is really fun! And take photos! Right now a significant portion of my feature area is either under water, has storm damage, or is closed due to either or both options. I’ll just be glad to get it out into the world when it comes to fruition. A large part of putting this book together is also reading some of the books that have been written over the years about the Big Thicket. I have a stack of out of print books I’ve been buying off Abe Books and need to work my way through those. What’s depressing is just seeing how much has changed out there since the Thicket was made a National Preserve in 1974, the same day at Big Cypress. Looking on aerial imagery shows you how fragmented it all is. There’s been recent talk about BTNP expanding its footprint via some of the timber lands as those companies may be interested in selling off land to the federal government, which would be really great if they can make it happen. Otherwise it’s going to be sold to developers, especially as state and federal road projects take off this decade and in coming decades in that region. That Big Thicket way of life is going to disappear even faster. So, yeah, that’s where my head has been for months and especially now as I really try to make plans to knock off hikes on my list that needs to be accomplished. My other thing is evaluating what I’m doing and asking: Do I really want to do this project/random thing or am I doing it because it’s an easy dopamine hit, the lowest apple on the tree, or because it is a distraction from the real thing I want to focus on. This can mean anything from replying to idiot posts on various social media to doing a creative project that distracts from an actual project I have been wanting to do for whatever amount of time it’s been on my brain. Some of this is prompted by parts of the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that a reader, Kate, recommended to me. I only got about a third in when I had to return it and get back on the library’s kindle list to borrow it again, but it gave me enough food for thought to knock me back on some kind of track. I’ll do a book report update sometime in June. I’m working my way through a few books right now. As for other distractions, this spring I watched all 9 seasons of Suits, which was surprisingly good! And then I saw Gabriel Macht in one of the first episodes of Sex and the City the other night and had to do a double take because damn was he young! I mean, it was 1998, I was young, too! Sex and the City does not hold up…at least it seems that first season. I started watching because I wanted something on while editing photos but it’s kinda cringe! I ended up switching to Killing Eve and that has been a good decision! Spy/assassin thrillers are right up my alley! Milkweed tussok moth caterpillars in the garden I’m also determined to get the garden into shape this summer but my will is starting to fade on that. Truly would just like the energy I had in my early 30s back. I actually had more to write but I started this before kid bedtime and now it is after kid bedtime and Killing Eve is calling me as is my own bedtime, so I’ll have to return for another brain dump post soon! Tell me what you are reading, watching, and doing outdoors these days in the comments!

I have finally given up any pretense of writing in a timely manner here. Or sticking to a frequency schedule. Life is busy, writing time is scarce. Let’s roll back to February of this year when we hiked the Four Notch Loop of the Lone Star Trail up in Sam Houston National Forest, where we did a quick overnight hike to see the southern twayblade orchids. Unfortunately I don’t know when we will be back on the LST or anywhere in Sam Houston because the Forest Supervisor just issued a major closure order for a significant portion of roads and trails in the NF due to historic flooding events in early May. While I’m sure trails and roads will open as they assess damage, it looks like their initial jump off point is — closed until June 2026! Two years! Listen, I get having to assess damage and fix roads but considering we have a lot of public lands that allow off-trail use and have no maintained trails, two years seems a little excessive to close off an entire forest to recreation. I digress… I wanted to return to the Four Notch to photograph these orchid in bloom better than when we’d initially came across them back in 2018. Also, it was for another project that I hope to talk about soon! It took a little time to re-locate the original population and I do think that some of that area has changed due to erosion as it’s very near a creek crossing. I’d even loaded a GPS with an approximate point but we’d blown past it by about a tenth of a mile and as we were walking I started thinking harder on the area we’d passed and that I was fairly certain it was the location. We backtracked and sure enough Chris managed to spot two plants just off the trail in an area that looked like it would easily fall into the creek if there was a heavy flooding event. I kinda wonder now if those plants are still alive. Satisfied with relocating these plants, I took photos and was glad we saw what we came for—now we could just hike and find a place to camp later that afternoon. Except maybe half a mile later in a bottomland-y kind of area Chris spotted more orchids…and then more! We kept walking and stopping and lo and behold, they were much more prevalent along the trail than we had expected. But you had to actively be looking for them because they are tiny! They blend in with the leaf litter and if you aren’t focused on searching the ground for a tiny ruddy-brown orchid, you aren’t going to see it. Utterly delighted with finding more of the orchids than we ever expected, our spirits were lifted into the afternoon as we kept moving towards whatever campsite we could find to pitch the tent for the evening. Southern twayblade orchids are early bloomers, beginning around late January and peaking in late February and early March with a few stragglers continuing on into the spring. They are relatively uncommon, or just perhaps unseen, in Texas but once you have the eyes and habitat for them you’ll probably come across a couple. We found a few in another area near the Big Thicket a week later! The species is also found throughout much of the south in pockets of the right habitat, with a decent stronghold along the Atlantic seaboard in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. February seems forever ago, especially as I peer out at the expanse of June and July and what I have on my calendar for that! And hopefully the Forest Service will come to their senses after initial evaluations and open the forest up for hiking much sooner than two years from now!