Catharina Coenen
Fall \ Of the Glasgow Climate Conference
I won’t tell you about the apple. Another woman. Under another tree.
Only about the mushrooms. The mushrooms are. Orange and brown. Inky, black-and-white, white-dotted red. Brittle and leathery. They cup. They curl. They parasol. They shelve, bracket, wing. They cap and ooze and slime. They eat all that has fallen, they make things fall. They make fall. This fall. They fell. Trees and time. The log on which I sit.
The mushrooms collect. Rain. And soil. And love.
Rain-that-has-been still clings. It rises in sunbeams, the flecks that lick the moss. Skyward, skyward, light, lighter, gone. No longer caught in droplet now, no longer dropping. Drops will, again, fall, later, in another place, from another sky. For now, for here, this moisture will soon, soon, be memory.
Damp mushroom-scent. Moss-scent. Moth scent: Antennae aquiver, sniffing without breath, gliding, tumbling, sampling: here, there, towards. Always towards. Always losing, always finding, the trace that oak inscribes in air. Damp-wax scent, leaf-drop scar smell, guide to bud scale, to bark-crevice, lighting the way to where to put the egg, one more egg for one more spring.
My eyes follow the flutter, the tumble, the rising towards twigs. My neck bends backwards, backwards, then my back; my hands sink into moss behind me on the log.
Good luck, moth. Good luck, oak. Good luck.
Beyond the moth, a plane. It blots the sun, moves, shark-like, silent, across the sky-gap between oak and oak. It leaves a contrail, moisture not from rain but burning kerosene, painting the death of creatures on a seafloor millions of years ago across what should be blue, be now, be cold. A water veil, thick enough to hold in warmth that should escape. A wrapping driving us, the moth, the oak, and me, towards more heat. Driving oaks to stumble, northward, faster than they grow, too slow, too slow, to outrun heat, and rot, and moths.
The sun-flecks now less gold, more gray. The shadows blacker.
Beneath my fingers, wood sponges, gives under fingernails, cool-slicks palms. I want to hold this in. This cool in former tree, this water, this time of moth and oak, still here, still still.
The binoculars, forgotten, in the car. Again. I’m glad. I can still hear: the plick, plick of the hairy woodpecker I cannot quite see. The dee-dee-dee of chickadees, hunters of moth and egg, who take fall light for spring.
“Time to go,” I say, to Bonni, by my feet. She cocks her head, one ear up, one down.
Time for the mushrooms. Time to go. Not since Eden and the apple tree, not since fire, not since horses, or since dogs, not since the wheel, but, yes, since coal, since oil, since the combustion engine, it has been time for us—to go.
Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to Northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have recently appeared in Threepenny Review, Blackbird, The Pinch, and Best of the Net. Catharina is the recipient of Creative Nonfiction Prizes from The Forge and from The Appalachian Review, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency.