It was startling, as much as a sometimes flapping white plastic bag can startle. It was across the street, just inside the small stand of woods. It should not have been there. It wasn’t there yesterday, was it?

The bag drew attention, a visual target, something grossly out of place. Non-biodegradable, threatening to remain, even if later half buried, for an epoch well beyond our communal lifetimes.

And then I noticed the lofty evergreen tree nearby, clearly planted with landscape intention, once carefully trimmed, shaped.  A yew. It was meant to be at the corner edge of a well tended yard.  It looked as if it might have decided years ago to join its untrimmed brethren, a slow sashay into the woods.  More likely, it stood impassively, editing any comment as the encroaching wildness, brambles and briars, hearty ever entwining bark, twisted its way toward and around what was a solitary presence, the lighthouse swallowed by its once warned sea.

Despite a year of observing the woods across the street, watching the sun rise through its essence,  I had never noticed this  large yew tree.  It took the visiting white bag to show up first, to blink like a sideways glancing eye.