From Word To Word

The hill, raising its stones from the harbour, is left to nature, to the scrambling cedars and to the little northern scrub plants, dogwood and sumac and creeping juniper, finding purchase here or there, but the heights have all been claimed by cottages, claimed long enough ago that their lawns now imitate their more southern and more suburban counterparts, so the trees are much fewer, if mostly cedar still, and the brush has vanished altogether, and the trees that do remain stand with their lower trunks bare, so that they seem to wade with their skirts up, long-legged in the waves of unruly foliage below them.