Succession Where the river once ran, the black soil sprouts pulpy birch. Scattered among them, a few slender striped maple. Waist high, a miniature beech dangles a handful of nuts over four foot banks. One thousand, two thousand years, the land changes slowly, at its leisure. The last few feet of stone go, the high side of the falls mosses over, the old channel silts up, an oxbow mire: then peat, alder, a few slim birches. Maple and beech attain fat men's girth, rotting at the edges, towering where birches fled, dropping the vanguard seed. But for blade and match, a few generations would erase us. A squirrel could travel tree by tree from the Saint Lawrence to the Mohawk. The seedling pine my grandpa nursed already threatens the foundation walls, chokes his drainpipes with blind root. The forest takes the space it needs, takes its time, year by year, bark creeping over fire-scars, ingesting spikes and barbed wire, shattering slabs of burned barn floors, growing by millimeters. Come spring, patient as China, it trickles through hedgerows, encroaching on the house. Raindrops drip from leaftip to tip. from treetop to carport, a pizzicato spatter. Roots grope down, surround the well. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved.