This is the fifth and final installment of NinaMacLaughlin’s11月column, which has run every Wednesday this month.

沙龙哈珀，Germany, mise en scene.1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

几个星期前,在初霜前,前days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal.

I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and look at the underbellies of leaves and show me what he knew. I felt lucky to learn, and tried to pay attention. The boardwalk footpath lead deeper into a boggy place, and the silence seemed to densify around us, and we tread with lighter steps. On the planked path he paused. “Sphagnum moss,” he said, pointing to a mound. I told him I did not like the wordsphagnum.，它听起来像你患有的东西。“虽然感觉到了，”他说。这是良好的建议。德赢沙巴体育我蹲下来，把我的手掌压入苔藓。它很酷，潮湿和羽毛，可缓解，热情和柔软。我想把我的脸放在它，我的整个身体，让我的整个重量吸收到这种冷却云的植物中。阅读更多