Summer Interlude II
Rain in August. Something I didn’t hope for in a drought year. One point six inches – twice the monthly average – in what is usually our second driest month of the year. An August wetter than our June. An August wetter than our May, even.
And so, on the tail end of a lingering COVID case, my COVID cohort and I struck out on a cool Saturday morning for our favorite chanterelle patch, wondering if there was any chance.
Nine years ago, when we first stumbled into what we now lovingly refer to as Chantitown I couldn’t shake the sense of being in a dream. The cool, still air. The moss draped cedar limbs. The slope of the land, the softness of the duff, the pleasing plunge of the heel on every downhill step.
And the orange blooms of chanterelles. Some delicately ruffled at their caps’ margins. Some fused in clumps of three and four. Some the size of a hand, fingers outstretched. Some even larger. Everywhere.
As a child I had recurring dreams of finding myself in such circumstances – in a field of wildflowers, for instance, and once at a peacock farm, feathers everywhere – where the abundance of beauty was overwhelming and I was free, welcomed even, to gather to my heart’s content.
At first a mania sets in. The gathering is fast and arms, bags, baskets fill quickly. But after a short while an astonishment takes over. The need, great as it was, is met so completely that urgency only shortens the experience. An ease settles in. And a delight.
I’m learning to cut to this ease.
This time around, my fever – my lone symptom – helped me get there. We wandered slowly off the trail toward the pockets, folds, and slopes of Chantitown. Surely not, I thought to myself, tempering my own expectations. But then there they were. Little orange buttons, unmistakable against the dark earth.
The farther off the trail we wandered, the more we found. And not just buttons (which we quickly realized we could leave to grow more) but lovely, fresh, caps and blooms. Not the largest we’ve found in this spot, but firm and bright and abundant. In August.
We’d come prepared with baskets, but we’d forgotten our knives. As the extent of the harvest available became apparent, I thought of a story I’d heard in church as a girl. A village in distress, a crop killing drought. A call to prayer to which everyone showed, but just one of these supplicants, a child, showed up with an umbrella.
We pinched the firm stalks with our fingertips and made do. We filled our basket with enough mushrooms for one big dinner and left the rest for others in the hopes that they will do the same for us later in the season when they are first on arrival to such a bounty.
Then we stumbled back out of the cool, dense trees into the clearcut margins of these woods and filled another basket with blackberries, relishing the overlap of this twin harvest, usually separated by months.
