Salt Lick

The hillside keeps its own calendar— lichen creeping south along the granite, rain finding the same grooves each spring, wearing the stone into a language only the next century will read.

I watched a deer press its tongue to the exposed mineral face at dusk, patient as a monk at prayer, drawing from the rock what the rock had drawn from deeper earth.

There is a kind of hunger that does not diminish what it touches. The fog this morning left the fence posts darkened, glistening, almost new— each one remembering the sea.

My grandmother kept a jar of river stones on the windowsill above the sink. She never explained them. They sat in the light and slowly lost the smell of water.

I think now she understood that holding is itself a wearing down, that love is the salt lick and we are the landscape it reveals— grateful, and dissolving.