On Mushrooms and Bliss

Foraging for life and managing loss

mo·rel

/məˈrel,môˈrel/

[noun] a highly prized, edible, springtime mushrooms — sometimes growing around dead trees… sometimes… nature makes no promises

After the harsh winter thaw, the woods call to me like a siren song. They are not beautiful yet. Geese fly back to the cold landscape of Minnesota honking their return announcement overhead. Fuzzy, plump bumblebees, round and big as marbles buzz around the purple waterleaf herbs. The brown dead of winter and the smell of decaying leaves crunching, or more accurately, glurping their rot and decay still lingers. It’s less than idyllic. But those early buds promise that very soon, underfoot, the magic of morel mushroom season is coming.

The thing about hunting morels is that the harder you look, the more attached you are to finding them, the more likely they are to evade you. Your gaze must lilt along the landscape with no expectations. I have a theory that if your eyes are too greedy, mother nature rations your mushrooms. She reminds you that simple mortals cannot possibly understand the vast complexities of the rhizomatic connections happening in the soil under our feet.

I’ve heard countless old wives tales of where to look for morels. “Check your south facing slopes” is the most common one. I spent the first two years heading to the hillsides, the damp land around watershed areas, the dead oak trees. Not once has a morel popped up where I think it is “supposed to.” I once spent two hours in the woods behind my house only to stomp back into my yard empty handed and find two standing proudly in the middle of my lawn.

…

Bliss was a far superior mushroom hunter to me. To everyone actually. It was Mother’s Day, 2019 the first time she came over to instruct my feeble attempts at uncovering them in the rotting decay of my backyard wooded acreage. Immunotherapy treatment had lessened its grip on her weakened body, so I was grateful for the fact that she could come over at all, let alone hike through the woods. We found only one that day; a tiny, pathetic thing barely resembling a mushroom nestled itself under a felled tree at the top of a hillside. She laughed and said, “Well this one doesn’t count, I feel bad even picking it, but here, this is what they look like!”

After Bliss first baptized me into the challenge of this treasure hunt hobby, hardly a day passed in May when I didn’t go for a “dip” in the woods and at least take a peek. It made sense to me now why she loved it so much. She was my crunchy granola bestie, who demanded I stop drinking water out of plastic bottles, and insisted on not washing the vegetables in her garden because eating dirt was “good for my microbiome.” I willingly obliged, knowing how important these ethics were to her as cancer ravaged her body.

Today, I don’t often make plans to go mushroom hunting. I just sort of wander in. Fate carves out time in my calendar. Which isn’t the wisest because mushroom season is also tick season and I should probably put on a hat, long sleeves, tall socks, and boots instead of a tank top and crocs. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have come out of the woods a time or two with itchy ankles in need of cortisone cream from god-knows-what itch weed.

The best time to wander in is first thing in the morning with my steamy mug of coffee. Even if I only come back with two or three morels, it’s the perfect amount to throw in my cast iron with a pad of butter and eat alongside my morning eggs. Foraging for a meal that close to eating it has a Little House on the Prairie feeling that is nothing short of addictive. If neuroscientists plugged mushroom hunters into fancy computers while we foraged, I am convinced they would note a spike in serotonin and dopamine every time we uncovered our precious shrooms.

We talked about our love of morels, among many other deep and not-so-deep topics, while hunting throughout the spring whenever Bliss was feeling well enough. Often with her 4-year-old son in tow, we scoured any woods we had permission to hunt (and some we didn’t). Her maternal instinct with him was otherworldly. She gushed with ooey-gooey lovejoy whenever he was along for the hunt. When we stumbled upon a creek or watershed area that we could not move him from, we left him to splash around while we hunted. He knew to stay put until we got back. With maternal wisdom she instructed him: “If there is danger, yell ‘MARCO’ real loud so mama can hear and I’ll yell ‘POLO.’” There never was. We always found our way back to him and started our trek back with a tired, wet, sun-kissed little boy along.

I’ll never forget staring slack jawed at her strength as her weakened body piggy backed him straight up the side of a ravine that required us to claw our way in the damp earth for traction. I volunteered to carry him. She just smirked at me in her mischievous way and kept climbing.

…

My own daughters have gotten used to me disappearing into the woods from time to time. We have an agreement that if they need me, (and only if it’s an emergency), they stand at the edge of the woods and yell, “MARCO!” and l respond, “POLO!” so they can find me. More than a handful of times, when a salesperson or neighbor has stopped by looking for me, my daughters shrug with a nonchalant “We don’t know exactly where she is, somewhere out in the woods.”

You cannot rely on finding mushrooms where you’ve found them before. Sure you might get lucky a year or two and find them near your tried-and-true spots. But as soon as you come to depend on that trusted dead elm tree to produce your mushroom harvest for the year, they seemingly evaporate.

Gone from my gaze, but never my memory

I didn’t know it would be her last morel hunting season. Seven months later she was gone from my gaze, but never my memory. I make a ritual each year of going to the first place I found that tiny morel with Bliss. I’ve never found one there since. Fear and familiarity keep us stuck in the past. I memorialize it, pay it its due respect, but I can’t dwell there long or I risk rumination. Rumination is a sticky trap to a past that never points me down my next road. The hunt can only be done in the present. Short visits down memory lane are fine so long as I remember that there isn’t anything new for me there, I’m not walking that direction.

This year on Mother’s Day we enjoyed Bliss’s mouth-watering basil lemonade recipe in mason jars and taught our kids to look for morels. Hilariously, little Alice misheard “morels’’ as “mallows.” So, as good mothers do, we carried pockets full of marshmallows through the woods and threw them out like Easter eggs when she wasn’t looking. Every time they found a pile of white bird poop they grieved the loss of the marshmallow that they imagined had been “squished.”

…

I continue to hunt for mushrooms. Sometimes I find them, sometimes I don’t. But it doesn’t really matter, because once I get home my nervous system is regulated. And I can more eagerly and patiently answer the call of “MARCO” in the distance with an enthusiastic “POLO!” Today, when my kids are grinding on my last nerve, I think back to Bliss in the final stages of her cancer journey, climbing up a ravine with a 4-year-old on her back without complaint. With a sense of adventure really, smiling and laughing through the obvious pain.

Bliss was here and gone as fast and furious as those mushrooms appear in the spring and then mysteriously vanish overnight. I still don’t know that I fully comprehend all that her life and death had to teach me. I also don’t understand the how, when, or why of those mischievous mushrooms.

Then again, I’m not sure understanding any of it is really the point anyways.

Marco!