The Witch's Forest

In the past couple of weeks it went from cool to rainy to hot and everything has come to full bloom, seemingly overnight. Trees that barely had buds a couple of weeks ago now have full size leaves and flowers, and literally every surface of this city is covered in a dusting of green pollen. It's April in Birmingham, which is similar to June or July in most places I've lived. This week calls for highs in the 80's every day, and this is just a taste of what's to come. Our backyard, as we discovered last summer, can turn into a jungle after a couple of days of rain, and since we didn't move in until July, I am pleasantly surprised to see that Spring in our neighborhood is actually very pretty. The air is fragrant and bug-free, the grass is soft. Bushes that I thought were dead are flowering. Here are some pictures I took the other night of our house and the yard.

We are lucky to live on a pretty quiet street. You could say that we live on a cul-de-sac, but that isn't quite accurate. The house next to ours is the last house on the street, but then the road simply stops. It's as if it wants to keep going, but it hits a giant wall of vines.

I like to compare it to the wall in the movie Labyrinth, it looks like it stops there, but what you can't see until you walk right up there is that there is an opening to the... Witch's Forest.

There is a little bit of wooded land back there that no one (except neighborhood kids I see sneaking out of there) really knows about. Beck dubbed it the Witch's Forest last summer, and now that it is warm again, we have been making evening trips out there to visit the witch. Usually what happens is we walk down there, look around, throw some things in "the hole," look for bugs, look for good sticks, hit stuff with said sticks, and then Beck will declare that we better head home before we wake up the witch. We have a lot of great conversations out there- sometimes we will talk about what happened to the dinosaurs and why they are extinct (we talk about this a lot in our house). Sometimes we will talk about what bees like to eat. Even if it is getting really dark and I am starting to feel a little creeped out I stay there until he decides it's time to go.

Here are some pictures of the Witch's Forest which, like the rest of Hoover, is currently covered in Wisteria:

The "secret" entrance.

A waterfall of wisteria.

"The hole". You can't tell by looking at this picture, but this hole is actually about a foot and a half deep. Throwing things into it and jumping over it are just two of the many fun things to do in the Witch's Forest.