I've been out walking in the fields to look at the night sky tonight, and it is the first such night that I've done so this year. This is the first week where the average temperature day and night has hovered around 60 degrees. I keep walking around with this lingering expectation of being cold, but the air is continually, convincingly mild. You can almost see the earth greening up and revving its engines for an orgy of new growth. The peepers have serenaded us day and night for nearly two weeks, and have become the rich but static background of our auditory lives the way rushing water ceases to be foremost in your hearing while camping next to a creek. Trying to imagine them each sitting there in the mud, singing madly for love and lust into the night, seems difficult somehow. The amplitude of their calls far outstrips their stature.
Thomas looked at me the other day after I'd just seen the forecast, and he had this smug grin. "You know what that means, don't ya?", said he. I smiled knowingly, but then couldn't settle for sure on what he was assuming I knew. "Time to get planting?", I wondered aloud. "No, well, that too, but something better: Morels growing. That's what they take, the first 60 degree week, and they start growing. I bet they're out there right now, little primordia awaking and getting ready to bust out!"
This is my foremost memory of moving to Dancing Rabbit last spring. Sara and I arrived just before the peak of morel season, and I watched Thomas journey out every day. He was the walking man, who could be seen like a character in a story, striding across the peak of the next ridge with his big boots and long legs and a beat up old backpack, silhouetted against the bright Spring sky behind him„walking the Earth. He'd come back every day from some other part of the land with a bounty of morels and other treasures. I gradually learned a few spots myself along some of the fence lines, and had a couple journeys of magical discovery, going morel hunting.
Those morels just erupt from the ground like Zen Buddhist forest spirits, in this impossibly, improbably erect, majestic form, and harvesting them is a more rewarding experience than harvesting nuggets of gold could be. It is as though the Earth is reaching out tiny, highly sensitive feelers to interact with your senses. Everything from harvesting and holding these magnificently textured beings in your hands to cutting them into minutely crenellated rounds is a sensual experience. When they're sliced and fried in butter or olive oil, the taste is a concentrated, highly potent agent of the warm, musky-rich essence of the soil. That taste lasts deep into your belly for a long time after you eat it. The thought that these primordia are out there, erupting out of the ground at this very moment, spurred deep by the thick heavy rain this morning, is almost too much for me to take. My own body tingles as though it wants to spring forth in similar resplendence„time to kick off these heavy winter clothes and feel the breeze across my skin. Everyone into the gardens! The transition is upon us:
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