Listening is just as rewarding as watching. I think King Crimson’s Robert Fripp once described the difference between hearing and listening as the difference between Terry’s All Gold and French confection.
I had just turned onto Kleineflossendelleweg after watching, not merely looking at, the heron and was walking quietly, mindfully. The remaining vestiges of Sunday’s snow lay in the shadows of trees, untouched by warmth. I noticed a change in the trees. The beech remained without canopy and I am used to the sound the wind makes in them. The sound shifted. It became fuller, richer. I paused and looked up to my left. Sure enough, looming over the young beech pathside there were resinous, evergreen conifers.
Stevens has those trees in that very place on his maps of a hundred or so years ago. You can see the areas filled with glaucous stars, marking conifer plantation against the pale wash of deciduous wood.
As for that mouthful of a compound noun, Kleineflossendelleweg probably translates as 'path by the valley of the little reeds'. “Flos”, in the singular, really does sound wet. I cannot help thinking of the River Floss on which George Eliot’s mill stood. The word carries the same soft, marshy murmur, as if its roots reach back to some older language of water and hollow ground.
See that radiating star of a carrefour to the right? I’d better check that out on a later visit.