EINSTEIN’S HAIR
There’s lichen called “Einstein’s Hair”. I wonder if this is it. Whatever this lichen is called, it is certainly thriving. Growing and happy in its surroundings, presuming, of course, that plants, fungi and lichens have feelings.
This lichen is a bit like some of us. It likes to be quiet and undisturbed, to bask in the sunshine and fresh air and enjoy gently falling rain. Then it reaches out its branches to embrace the world. It enjoys its particular place, beautifying an otherwise neglected spot on the roof of an abandoned outhouse.
The wind must have blown strongly one day, and wafted spores from the parent lichen up, up and away up onto old, damp wood where the paint had worn off. It took some time for me to find the lichen because I had been looking at the base of the outhouse, near the ground, thinking I would find moss or lichen there. The spore had found an unoccupied crevice in the wood grain, was nurtured by rain, snow and sun and it flourished.
This lichen is not solitary. It is three in one; two different types of fungus plus an alga. They work together in symbiosis to protect and nourish each other.
Some people in my family and community provide protection for me like the pharmacist who provides medication. I protect my granddaughter by showing her how to watch for cars when we cross the street. Some people nourish me; the local greenhouse workers who sell me fresh vegetables all year round. I nourish a relationship with a kind word or a listening ear.
I went back to that outhouse the other day, to see how this lichen survived the winter storms. Disappointingly there was no trace of it ever having been there. Maybe by autumn a new spore will have embedded itself into the old wooden boards, and grown until its strange branched finger-like projections again reach to the sky.
I like lichens.
by Andrea Kidd
