Homeboy at Home: on the Threshold

May 22, 2021: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:16 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). Awash in the pale light of the moon: owl calling at dawn; titmouse calling at midnight. 63 degrees (spring masquerading as summer), wind N 0 mph. Sky: clouds almost indistinguishable, traces of blue-white above a drapery of haze; ground fog, thin and sprawling; Mount Ascutney masked. Intermittent streams: puddled. Permanent streams: rapid drawdown, on the toe of a drought. Wetlands: mallard quacks in the mist; around the edges catbirds, swamp sparrows, and yellowthroats hold court; in the interior, peepers peeping and bittern tails-off after an all-nighter. Pond: a skim of woodland trash—pollen, petals, leaf fragments; like a graceful finger over a dusty table, the breeze inscribes the surface, curlicues, spirals, flourishes of morphing art. 

DOR: gray squirrel AOR: two ravens, mid-road, eating gray squirrel

Striped maple flowers, strings of tiny bells, one above the other dangle like wind chimes. Yoke-yellow golden Alexander in bloom along the edge of the road. Foamflower—white, delicate, lacy, snowflake-like flowers—on thin stems adjacent to a moss-covered stone wall. Then, as if by magic, four morels, as big as pinecones, appear, pushed up the earth around the foamflowers. Honeycombed and hollow, a mushroom hunter's gold standard. Reflexively I pick them, mushrooms spilling out of my palm. Breakfast? Dinner? Soup? A Holarctic treat found across the Northern Hemisphere (also in Patagonia). Many species. Taxonomy in dispute, if not disrepair—three species, fifteen species, twenty species. FAKE NEWS: online account claims morels evolved 50,000 years ago from yeast cells, analogous to claiming hummingbirds evolved from amoebas during the Ice Age.

Morels followed dinosaurs out of the Jurassic. Unlike the dinosaurs, however, 65 million years ago, they survived the planetary holocaust. Mushrooms fed early humans wandering out of Africa; they provided the first immigrants to arrive in the New World, circa 15,000 years BP, a delicious alternative to mammoth pudding and a treat for every other person crossing the Atlantic or Pacific after that. Like the location of timber rattlesnake dens and brook trout pools, mushroom aficionados keep mum about morel geography. 

I look for morels the whole way home. Find none.

Marvel of athletic accomplishment: ruby-throated hummingbird flies across the Gulf of Mexico; red-eyed vireo sings non-stop, dawn to dusk . . . a woodland broken record. Veery spins tunes out of the mist. Flicker loud, an imperious outburst. Pileated silent. Sapsuckers chase each other, the agitation of woodpeckers. Great-crested flycatchers holler. Tanager, an aristocratic remove, hard to see in the oaks, song a throat-clearing version of robin. Is there a more vibrant red anywhere? 

The marsh calls. Female American toad east of the lower pasture. Swollen with eggs. Treefrogs, trilling in the aspens, take an arboreal route. Lemony sunlight, veiled by haze, filters across the valley, a triumphant world of living green. Only ashes are bald, black-budded twigs await their turn. 

Late May 2021, amid mosquitoes and blackflies, magic, the verge of another day . . . dawn effloresces into morning.