Swampy weather, cottonwood 'flowers'

[neverspent]

I went to the park today after over a week's absence. The river has receded enough that they've finally opened the lock upstream, but more rains last night pooled over the already-saturated ground and made it sloppy going. More noticeable than the puddles were the mosquitoes. It's skeeter paradise: extremely humid and warm with shallow water everywhere for breeding. Very swampy.

More pleasantly, I noticed that a lot of the cottonwood seed pods that have lost their cotton are open and dry on the ground now. They look like stiff little four-petaled flowers, like they just fell out of a commercial flower arrangement. Lovely, in a rustic way.