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.
lichen
November 15, 2024
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.
March 9, 2024
Rain and robin song. The sky darkens. The black birches look dapper in their gray-green suits of lichen.
February 23, 2024
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.
December 3, 2023
Steady rain. An hour past sunrise the sky brightens a little, and the trees in their green sleeves of lichen begin to glow.
November 30, 2022
Rain-slick trees green with lichen dance in a puddle’s punctuated sky.
December 11, 2021
Foggy and damp on the last day of regular firearms deer season. The limbs of the old crabapple glow blueish green with lichen.
December 14, 2019
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.
December 21, 2018
The fog slowly thins, revealing gray-green patches of rejuvenated lichen on tree trunks and limbs. The year pivots on its hinge.
October 27, 2018
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.
April 16, 2018
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.
March 31, 2017
The sound of steady rain unmediated by leaves. Civilization is reduced to a distant rumble. Tree trunks break out in patches of lichen.
October 8, 2016
It’s pouring. Lichens glow on rain-dark trees, pale blue and green rashes. Through a thickening carpet of fallen leaves, the bright moss.
May 1, 2016
Lichens are aglow after a night of rain, the tulip tree’s trunk painted the same pale green as its leaves. New warbler songs off in the fog.