‘Lambent incandescence’

— Photo by David Ohmer

”The water was palpably soft, and floating with the current we were invisible in the wispy layer of fog. Then, in what seemed like a flash, the sun hit the river and the fog disappeared. The surface was completely still, and looking toward shore I saw, as if below me in the dark water, a buried valley of lambent incandescence. Looking above the bank I saw what at first seemed to be, in that ethereal atmosphere, a reflection of what the water held.’’

— Jerrold Hickey (1922-2007), on his “earliest memory of fall foliage,’’ along the Charles River in Newton, Mass. This is from an essay he wrote for Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons (1980)