[Update: January 4, 2015. Marsha informed me today that what I mistakenly thought was a sycamore seed pod is actually a sweet gum tree pod although the bark of the tree it was sitting under looked suspiciously like the sycamore tree and not the sweet gum tree. Marsha was kind enough to bring one of her sycamore pods in for comparison and it is a much fuzzier entity than the prickly one I photographed. Could a squirrel have carried it off and dropped his or her prize? Who knows! Many thanks, though, Marsha for setting me straight. By the way, the paw paw is an etirely different tree altogether so my great-grandmother was way off the mark.]

Today on our walk, we discovered a wealth of small joys, not the least of which was this lovely seed pod from the Sycamore tree. I can remember my great-grandmother calling these paw paws and I always thought that was funny but they are rather strange; almost as if the sycamore tree was trying to create a snowflake or snowball.