theMoss Notebook

A naturalist's hand-inked journal of one year spent walking forests, naming fungi, listening to streams, and noticing the very small things.

↓ open at spring, or wander anywhere — the pages are loose ↓

part one — the turning year

Four Seasons in the Field

Each season is a taped-in note, written the way it was found — some days in full sentences, most in fragments, all of them outdoors.

Spring

Mar 3 – May 29

The creek has come back. It was a thread in winter; now it is a rumor all the way down Birch Hollow, and by April it is a voice. The vernal pool on the lower trail is shallow and loud — every spring peeper in the county seems to have booked the same room.

First crocus under the fence post I always photograph, out of superstition. Swifts at 5:10 a.m., which is earlier than I am. The maples are not leaves yet, just the red suggestion of leaves, and the whole ridge looks bruised in a good way.

note: counted 3 swift passes in a minute. that is a lot of wingbeats. that is a lot of everything.

Summer

May 30 – Sep 3

Heat by June. The forest floor keeps its own cool hour — by 11 the shade under the beeches is a different animal than the shade in October. Sat on a fallen trunk for two hours and let a family of field mice audit my pockets. They decided. I was approved.

The meadow went over. Queen anne's lace in the flood cut, milkweed along the gravel road, one great luna moth on the porch at dusk, wings folded like a paper plane that had decided to stay. Dragonflies policed the pond like a small, patient police force.

the luna stayed 3 days. i did not blink at it more than a few times. it knew i was watching. it did not care.

Autumn

Sep 4 – Nov 28

September is the season of giving everything away at once. The sugar maples went yellow before I was ready; the oaks hold on like they are keeping a grudge. Mushroom season proper: a carpet of king stropharia along the lower trail, and two fly agarics so red they argued with the October light.

First hard frost on the 21st — found it as a ring of silver on the birch leaf I press each year for the calendar. The owls started early this year. A tawny, or something with that same dry laugh, from the beech woods, at 6 a.m. I was not asleep. I am never asleep when they are on.

autumn is the forest doing its books. everything tall gets sold, and the ground gets richer for it.

Winter

Nov 29 – Mar 2

The trees, undressed. It turns out the forest is mostly architecture — in winter you finally see the buttress roots, the old scars, the way every snag is a cathedral nobody built. Woodpecker holes in a row up the ash, each one a window into a smaller dark.

Snow on the 12th, gone by the 15th, back for good the 3rd of January. The first deep tracks of the year: ruffed grouse, in a line, like someone was walking the trail with very small, very dignified boots. I walked beside them for a while.

winter taught me the forest is not less. it is just reading slowly.

part two — where all of this happened

Map of the Home Forest

Drawn from memory and one bad GPS day. The contours are honest; the scale is a suggestion. North is roughly up. The X is where the year began.

evergreens orchard trees creek walking loop

part three — the drawer of small things

Seven Specimen Notes

Pinned or pressed, sketched where found. Nothing here was collected. Everything was borrowed for a few pages and returned to the field.

Quercus robur

field maple-oak, big

Oct 14birch hollow

The one I measure each year against the ruler. This year: 21.4 cm. The crown of the tree is wider than the house. It will outlive both of us and be mildly unimpressed.

Amanita muscaria

fly agaric ×2

Oct 3lower trail

Two, side by side, like a matched set nobody ordered. The white warts look like old paint chips. Photographed, sketched, left exactly where the light was best.

Dryopteris filix-mas

male fern, unfurling

Apr 21grouse trail

Caught a crozier mid-unfurl, like a fern doing push-ups against the earth. The frond under the old stone wall unfurled 4 cm overnight. Measured with a ruler and a small amount of reverence.

Rhipidura (sp.)

one dropped flight feather

Nov 2orchard edge

Found on the orchard path, dry and gold. It weighed nothing and it weighed something. Pinned to the back of this page; it is the best thing in the drawer.

Actias luna

luna, 3 days on the porch

Aug 9–12porch

It folded its wings once and I understood: some things are only for the duration of one warm evening. It left on the third night, without the drama I had secretly prepared for.

Ephemeroptera

mayfly, one whole day

Jun 27miller's creek

The whole river was doing it — a slow silver rain in reverse. I watched one on the bank for its entire remaining life. I cannot say how long that was. It was enough.

Rubus fruticosus

bramble, the good kind

Aug 19fence line

The fence-line bramble is the one I keep. Thorned, patient, and it holds the last warm fruit of the year. My knees and one knee-patch of the notebook cover are the tax.

part four — the long one

Featured Observation

the birch at 4:17 a.m.

The 4:17 a.m. Fog in Birch Hollow — January, the coldest morning of the year, and the best-kept one.

I have kept this notebook for one year now, and if I had to say which single page holds the whole project in one place, it is this one. There is no name for what happened at the creek bend, so I am describing it badly, the way you do with weather that has arrived without an invitation.

The fog came in from the water first. That is the part people miss in the sketches. It did not fall; it arrived, level to my knees, moving upstream against the current of the creek, and every birch in the hollow stood up out of it separately, one at a time, like a row of white candles being lit at different moments.

The fog came in from the water first. It did not fall. It arrived.

Sound behaved strangely. The creek was audible the whole time — cold water over stone, the only thing with edges — but every bird call came from the same direction, the way a church bell comes from one mouth instead of four. A woodpecker knocked nine times. I counted. The count is here so that no one says I invented it.

I sat on the flat stone where the loop trail crosses the bend, because that is the flat stone, and my breath made a small second me at about two-foot range. The single birch I have been measuring for ten winters stood directly over me, bare and perfectly honest, and I understood for the first time that in winter the tree is the whole forest. Everything green I have ever drawn is just this, dressed up for the party.

By 5:04 the fog had gone where fog goes. The sun came over the ridge the color of a weak bruise. The birch was still. I packed up, and the notebook cover was dry even though I had been sitting on nothing but cold air for forty-five minutes.

marginal note: the fog is not the absence of the forest. it is the forest, slowed down until you can hear the architecture.

part five — the cold column

Weather Ledger

One row per month. Sky from the morning walk, the thermometer at the porch, wind where it mattered, and one note I couldn't keep out.

Month	°F high / low	Wind	Note
March	44 / 29	S 9	creek returns; ice leaves like a rumor
April	56 / 37	SW 12	one week of rain longer than expected; ferns furious
May	68 / 45	S 6	first full week of sun; everything apologizes and grows
June	79 / 55	SW 8	longest light; the meadow goes over
July	91 / 66	S 4	heat; two hours of sitting, one approval by mice
August	88 / 63	W 10	luna moth, 3 nights; storm on the 22nd, one branch down
September	76 / 51	NW 7	first mushroom season; the giving-away begins
October	59 / 41	NW 11	best foliage in ten years; two fly agarics, argued with
November	46 / 31	N 14	first snow on the 12th, gone by the 15th; a feather
December	38 / 24	N 13	deep snow Jan 3; grouse boots in a line, dignified
January	31 / 12	NW 15	the 4:17 fog; nine woodpecker knocks, verified
February	39 / 22	W 9	last month of the volume; the creek remembers

part six — what the year sounded like

Soundscape Notes

No recordings. The pencil is the only honest instrument I own, and even it lies a little.

4:52 a.m. · April

The vernal pool chorus

Not a chorus, actually — a stack of hundreds of soloists, each one convinced it is the whole orchestra. It has a beginning you can hear (the first peeper, testing) and an end you cannot (it just stops being worth it, everywhere at once, around 8 a.m.).

6:03 a.m. · October

An owl with a grudge

The dry, two-syllable laugh from the beech woods, low and slightly bored, the sound of something that has seen all your plans and is not impressed. It laughed, moved forty yards left, and laughed again. I have been less certain of myself.

1:15 p.m. · July

Cold water over stone

Miller's Creek in the heat. It is the only thing in the forest with a fixed address — you can stand on the bank for an hour and the sound does not change, because the sound is the creek. Everything else in the meadow was pretending to nap and losing.

11:40 p.m. · January

Snow falling on the roof, then nothing

The soft static of new snow, and then the thing that was the loudest sound I ever heard: a field going completely quiet at 1 a.m. with the creek the only exception. Quiet like a held breath. Quiet like a page before it is written.

4:48 p.m. · June

Nine woodpecker knocks

Verified count, second verification attached in the margin in case the first was hopeful. Each knock has a different pitch, like someone knocking on nine doors of the same house. The answer, when it came, came from behind me.

part seven — what fits in the pack

Field Supplies

Checked = used and still alive. Unchecked = lost, or still on the porch shelf, which is the same thing in the end.

this notebook, water-stained × 1
graphite pencil, 2B × 2
ink pen, brown × 1
watercolor half-pan set × 1, one wash of ochre
small sable brush, chewed once × 1
10 cm ruler, for the oak leaf × 1
field guide, fungi volume × 1
hand lens, 10× × 1
waxed canvas pack × 1
wool hat, with the hole × 1
magnifying loupe, the good one — missing since June
tape for pressing left at the cabin

part eight — the hand that held the pencil

About the Naturalist

— E. R., in the field

E. R. is a naturalist in the loosest and best sense of the word: not an expert, but a person who walks the same ten square miles every year and keeps letting them be new. By trade, they keep other people's records; by vocation, they keep the records of a single creek, its hollow, its orchard, and its meadow.

The Moss Notebook is the first of a set of volumes that may never end. The rule has always been simple — draw what you see, write what it was like, collect nothing — because the forest is not a museum and the notebook is not a trophy case. It is a witness. Ink is enough.

Everything in this journal is a drawing or a sentence made by one pair of hands, outdoors, most of it in cold weather, with a 2B pencil that the moss has now partially owned.

if you found this notebook lost in a field: it was never lost. it was only thinking. please return it before the leaves do.