Winter light pours down white through the trees that have dropped all their leaves. Across that white background one low stone wall runs a long way from left to right, and on top of the wall lies a thick layer of green that has nothing to do with the season. It is the only color in the photograph with any saturation left.
The wall lost its straight shape long ago. Its shoulder line has sagged here and there, and twigs and vines have pushed in between the stones and taken root. Even so, the line does not break. The fact that someone chose the stones one by one and stacked them remains after the form has collapsed.
A stone wall is built to divide something. Field from field, house from road, my share from someone else's. After that use disappeared, the wall did not come down but became a landform of the forest. The thickness of the moss is counting, on its behalf, the time it took for something made by human hands to be taken into nature.
Wet fallen leaves and broken branches lie scattered across the ground. What has collapsed and what has remained are inside the same forest, and the only standard separating the two is whether green has settled on top of the wall.
The light comes down at an angle from the upper left of the frame. So only the south face of the stone wall is brightly exposed, while the other side sinks into shade and the outlines of the stones blur. Every place where the moss sits thick is the side where shade lingers long, not the side the sunlight grazes. The distribution of the green was decided by which way the sun passed, more than by what the wall divided.
Looking at the photograph again, there is a point where the right end of the wall disappears behind a tree. How much further the wall runs beyond that cannot be known from this single frame.
