The First Storm Was a Rehearsal
The equinox passed on Tuesday. The first real storm of the season came through two days behind it. Half an inch of rain across the lowlands, gusts in the twenties and thirties, snow only above five thousand feet. Not much of a storm. A rehearsal.
The woodland took it as a threshold regardless. Rain that arrives in September lands on ground dry since July, and for a day it simply sits there. By the second day the moss on the north side had gone from gray to green. The whole slope smelled like the inside of a cedar.
Vine maple (Acer circinatum) has started along the sun-facing edge. Four or five leaves to a branch, no more than that, turning while the interior of the shrub stays flatly green. Oregon State records the species as coloring red, orange, and yellow in sun, and the shaded stems follow weeks later, or barely follow at all. In August, the same shrubs were only showing the first hint of autumn form. That hint is now a fact on one side of the plant and not on the other.
Western sword fern (Polystichum munitum) did what it always does, which is nothing. It looks in late September exactly as it looked in June. There is one material here that refuses to mark the season, and it is useful precisely because it refuses.
What the wind actually delivered was on the ground. Oakmoss (Evernia prunastri), a few small branches of it, scattered along the path on the north end. Gray-green, already loose, nothing cut.
That is how the season arrives here. Not as weather, but as something lying on the ground on the walk back.
