Entry 9: Morels and Other Tiny Miracles
A couple of days ago, my family finally succeeded in finding about 20 morels—elusive wild mushrooms, prized for their flavor. Morels are distinguished by cone-shaped, honeycombed caps, which not only lend them a fantastical appearance but also camouflage them perfectly among sun-dappled leaves on the forest floor.
The past couple of years, we’ve been incredibly lucky, foraging dozens of morels in the woods surrounding our home in Ohio. This year, though, our normal spots are barren, so we were thrilled when my husband’s father, who’s spending a few weeks in Grenada, tipped us off (morel hunters tend to be pretty stingy with the locations of their hunting grounds—for good reason).
As we stumbled around the base of a dead elm tree, plucking mushrooms by their cream-colored stems, my husband and I discussed the strange phenomenon of spotting a morel: You slowly scan the forest floor, seeing only leaves, fallen branches, curls of bark, and the green umbrellas of May apples. Then suddenly, a morel appears—half hidden by a leaf. And beyond it a pair of twin morels, gilded in evening light. They’ve been there all along, of course, but your eyes don’t register them until, by some combination of luck and attention, your brain identifies the shape it’s been seeking.
Morel-spotting, in many ways, represents the way I have come to experience this season in this place. I love spring in Ohio. In fact, I think it’s my favorite season here, or anywhere. But it wasn’t always this way. Before the age of 25, I’d never lived through a real winter, which means I’d never experienced a true spring. Then I moved from the South to Pennsylvania, where I spent months scowling at the gray winter sky, jaw clenched to prevent my teeth from chattering. Tired of having to pull on layers of clothes every time I left the house and longing for the deep green of summer, I began frequently asked my partner “When is it going to get warm?” in early March. The leafless trees, the muddy ground, the piles of dirty snow slush that sat in parking lots all over town felt like insults to my heat-seeking soul.
I’ve since come to anticipate and appreciate the early signs of spring—the pale pink blossoms of spring beauties carpeting the forest floor, silver catkins dangling from aspen branches, and gelatinous clutches of wood frog eggs in the vernal pool by the road (to name a few).
This week, I strapped baby Z to my chest, grabbed my in-laws’ dog Leroy, and headed into the woods with my camera. Everywhere I looked, I saw tiny miracles: New leaves, translucent and colorful as stained glass, caught the light of the sun. The silhouette of a spider revealed its perch on a buckeye leaf. Rust red capsules swayed over dense green mats of knothole moss.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” Mary Oliver once wrote. I’m inclined to agree.
