Halloween again and the colors are splendid! On that foggy day I came across the lichen covered bench of Figure 1 along the path Great Meadows. Always lonely benches on foggy days are reminiscent of lichen covered gravestones in some of our historic cemeteries. Here the nineteenth century is never too far behind us, and these woods intellectually and in spirit belong to Emerson and Thoreau.

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)