The morning came in cool, with the kind of light that does not so much fall on the forest as enter sideways through it, leaving the canopy in soft yellow and the floor in a wet brown. I walked the lower trail at half past six and stopped where the slope flattens before the ridge, because that is where this oak stands — not the largest in the grove, but the most patient. It has been here, by my reckoning of its rings two summers ago, for one hundred and four years.
I sat against the trunk for some time before I drew. There is a discipline in waiting until the tree feels less like an object and more like a presence; some mornings this takes ten minutes, some mornings an hour. Today it took the length of one slow flask of barley tea. The bark, when I finally laid my palm against it, was cool but not cold, and the deep furrows held a faint dampness that had not yet evaporated from the night before.
I noted three things in particular. First, the lichen colony on the north side has spread perhaps four centimetres since my last visit in the third month — a slow advance, but in a year of unusual dryness this is the kind of small persistence that is worth recording. Second, the wound where the storm took the lower branch is closing well; the callus tissue is rolled and pale, no rot beneath. Third, a small woodpecker — too quick to identify, but probably the lesser spotted — left fresh sapwood-coloured chips at the base, suggesting it has found its winter cache here again.
I will return at the seventh hour of the seventh day, which is when I have promised myself to begin the spring count of the seedlings. There are, as of last autumn, twenty-three young oaks within the radius of the parent's longest root reach, of which perhaps eight will survive their first full summer. The forest writes its own register, and I copy as much of it as I can into this book before the page is full.