midden

Today it is cold and windy - about 15ºF and feeling colder with the windchill.  At least it is sunny.  A good day to spend more than usual time indoors.  My brother asked about the word "midden" that I used a few posts ago - was I thinking "mitten" and being silly, or just getting bad at spelling?
No, I told him, a midden is a real thing - it is a trash heap.  In my line of work, we refer to a midden as a pile of nutshells or pinecone bracts (scales) and spines left under a tree or on a rock - or on a bridge rail, as in the accompanying photo.

If you look up midden in Wikipedia, it will tell you that a midden is human trash - often shells, since they take a long time to disintegrate - and that an animal midden is food storage.  We call food storage a cache, where I work.  So maybe I am using midden in a colloquial way, but there it is.


And just because it is pretty, here is a frost covered goldenrod stalk I found in the round meadow yesterday.