Barren but beautiful

In the Litchfield Hills of northwestern Connecticut.

"Now that flow of fruitfulness has ceased. Human husbandry has ended, and the wild seed is sown, and the earth lies resting from its prodigious labors.

But these spare fields, these now barren hillsides, the broad brown valley, and these irregular pastures nuzzling their way between silent sentinel wood lots, still breathe the richness and fullness of life itself, Connecticut version, to which it is a dear and irreplaceable privilege to belong.''

- From the November section of  In Praise of Seasons, by Alan H. Olmstead.