The older ground
At the opening’s big ebb, the sea withdraws far enough to expose a forest of black stumps beyond the marsh. The roots go down into clay. Ebbe remembers her father showing her bark and hazelnuts in the peat.
For her, the place is familiar enough to be mapped through small resemblances: a hand-shaped cluster, a leaning pair and the stump her brother calls the Reeve.
The opening asks the reader to learn that ordinary arrangement before looking for a disturbance in it. The forest is an old place inside an everyday life.
Read the landscape
Watch how tide, distance and the act of looking change what can be known. The shore reveals things on its own timetable.