Mushroom Hunting Samuel Hovda
Trees surround me like a crowd At a wake. I can no longer see my car, Let alone County Road 1 leading back To my grandfather’s farmhouse. These are my trees. My grandfather passed them, With the land I stand on, to my father, Who gave them to me with a hissing gasp Like the air being let out of a tire. I’m hunting morels. There is no underbrush, so I glide on my feet As if through the air. This is the ginseng patch I was forced To till, plant, and mulch for an entire summer When I was thirteen. Few plants grew the next year With no one to willingly take care of it. Still moving, I see on one tree up ahead, Branches bending their sharp elbows And wrinkled hands. I count the leaves: Eight copper rings—an Elm. At the base, one morel. I pluck it, Head the color between caramel and dirt, Shape of an elongated egg, With holes like in a sponge. I poke the tip of my pinky into one; A crack like the fissure in a granite Headstone in an old country-church cemetery Splits through the surface. I put a hand on bark and step Around the tree. On the other side, There is a troop of morels, a gallon-Ziploc-bagful, Waiting in the dirt, poking through the fallen leaves.
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