The stream is loud with snowmelt and last night’s rain. The fog retreats up the hillside, leaving black birch trunks aglow in green lichen.
lichen
Drizzle at sunrise. Rain-slick tree trunks shine in their green sleeves of lichen. The sky shows signs of breaking up.
We’re in the clouds. They drum on the roofs and echo with bird calls. A dead walnut branch, scaley with lichen, lies in the road like a landed fish.
Every morning should come with fog like this, and the leftovers of an all-night rain still dripping onto the porch roof, and bright lichen on dark bark, and chickadees.
Rain and robin song. The sky darkens. The black birches look dapper in their gray-green suits of lichen.
Foggy at dawn with sound out of the east—the quarry instead of the interstate. Gray-green lichens glow on the rain-darkened trunks of sweet birches all along the edge of the woods.
Steady rain. An hour past sunrise the sky brightens a little, and the trees in their green sleeves of lichen begin to glow.
Rain-slick trees green with lichen dance in a puddle’s punctuated sky.
Foggy and damp on the last day of regular firearms deer season. The limbs of the old crabapple glow blueish green with lichen.
Rain and fog. Gray-green lichen glows on tree trunks in the woods and on every twisted branch of the old crabapple beside the springhouse.
The fog slowly thins, revealing gray-green patches of rejuvenated lichen on tree trunks and limbs. The year pivots on its hinge.
Rain again. This is the dreariest, drabbest autumn I’ve ever seen—except for the moss and tree-bark lichens, which have never been brighter.
The sound of water has returned to the mountain. Trees wear dark suits of rain embroidered with lichen. In every puddle the same blank sky.
The sound of steady rain unmediated by leaves. Civilization is reduced to a distant rumble. Tree trunks break out in patches of lichen.