Other old and once popular names for it are: Dutchman’s-pipe; fairy smoke; convulsion weed; eyebright; bird’s nest; and American ice plant. It was called ice plant, according to Alice O. Albertson in her _Nantucket Wild Flowers_ (1921), because “it resembles frozen jelly and is juicy and tender and dissolves in the hands like ice.” One contemporary authority calls it “clammy,” which is accurate enough, and keeps it in the realm of ghosts and chills, but I think it was an exaggeration to say that it dissolves in the hands. I find it solid enough, not fragile or perishable to the touch. Its stems have a fibrous, tough core, which is sometimes hard to tear. It also has a pungent, woody smell, though this probably comes from the soil it grows in. All the same, it is an elusive, beautiful flower, a miraculous specialty. Coral pink shines almost translucently through the stems, which are covered with tiny white bracts, or scales, taking the place of leaves--scales of a tiny albino fish perhaps--and the bell-like flowers hang their stiff white heads straight down, with pink seed pods standing up between them, round, decoratively grooved little crowns. When the plant dies, it stands for months as a thin, brownish black string, having turned from beautiful ghost to lifeless reality. Over the mushrooms and Indian pipes, in subtle relationship to them, the leaves are losing their green chlorophyll and revealing the other, more stable pigments that last out long enough to make the familiar glory of the autumn. There is not so much a general “dying” in the fall, as an adjustment. Insect eggs are in the bark or ground, the mushroom spores are being carried through the air, the grasses are heavy with seed, acorns drop to the ground. One day last October I was hit with a shower of acorns from the white oaks. This year, since oaks fruit heavily on different years, I notice more acorns from the black oaks. How fast these acorns get to work! A little curling, probing, adventurous sprout comes from the nut, and in a short time has grown several inches. A few manage to take hold before the ground is frozen. A multitude of others provide food for squirrels, chipmunks, or blue jays. The measure of these arrangements is complex and elaborate. Between the leaf of a tree and a mushroom, worlds apart in function, there are connections of rainfall, temperature, or sunlight, in a context continually new, and though the ground colors fade, sunsets, seas, and inland waters will take over their active play.