The forest is a dream world, harboring fairies

​Rode back to NYC today along those rural highways, the scenery a spread of simple but striking gifts. The shaded forests of Pennsylvania, carpeted in lush and shaggy ferns and draped in vines — the greens unreal after the rain, the bark so dark. Swaths of white and lavender dame’s rocket on the roadside, splashes of color adorning the strips and slopes where light falls. Waving pools of tufted grass, flaxen, glimmering in the sun. I spot a lone young deer exposed, standing alert in the wide empty avenue cut through the trees by train tracks. In the higher altitudes, we enter cloudland. We pass clearings sliced by a creek, its shallow green-grown banks cradling thick fog, mist hanging in wisps over the grass, a spare white birch like a bleached bone rising. Narrow fern-blanketed paths lead through the trees, enticing. The forest is a dream world, harboring fairies. Everything disappearing into white.