MORE HOLDOUTS; AND NOT BETTING ON IT

SWAMP WHITE OAK LEAVES

PAPER BIRCH CATKINS

WEIGELA EMPTY SEED PODS

ASH TREE, LAST YEAR'S MALE FLOWERS

THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

Sunday,  11:00 AM.  30 degrees F, wind NW at high elevation, variable and moderate at lower.  The sky is partly cloudy, the sun trying to assert itself.  The humidity is 74%, the barometer more or less steady at 30.1".  I hate dailight saving time.
   Looking about the winter landscape, it is easy to find more interesting holdouts from the last growing season.  Some are readily explained as empty seed pods or dormant catkins.  Some are more cryptic, such as last year's male flowers on ash trees, which are only present on male trees, and are still obvious on those trees because the flowers were disfigured by galls formed by the parasitic ash flower mite.
   It being Sunday I do not make political comments, but commentary on cosmology would seem appropriate.
   As long as I can remember, even before the advent of the space program, there has been active speculation about extraterrestrial life.  Think Buck Rogers, and Orson Wells.  It has been a given that other intelligent life (considering the human species to be intelligent, which sometimes seems something of a stretch) exists elsewhere in the universe and that we will eventually meet.  We have even gone to great expense to establish vast arrays of huge radio telescopes, in our western deserts and in the West Virginia back country, to scan the galaxy for messages  from space, or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  All to absolutely no avail.  Nothing.
   Which leads me to conclude that we probably are, actually, alone in the vastness of time and space, the only creatures able to experience, explore, and potentially understand the universe.  Think about it.  Perhaps we, this miserable, struggling, self-destructive species are actually the highest current end product of God or evolution.  Either way, by design or by chance, this potential ought to be a truly humbling concept, one which would make us humans realize the enormity of our destiny, and the sacredness of our existence, both as individuals and as a society.
   But I'm not betting on it.