We have had the most spectacular autumn in memory. Even to a color-blind boy such as myself the shades of the season have been alarming in their density and variety. Perhaps one of the best things about moving to Connecticut from Long Island is the superior colors of autumn. Long Island has great farms, beaches and harvests but not the color of New England. Too many oaks that hang on to their dying brown and gray leaves too long are not a sight to behold. My mother’s street is full of these types of trees with their dead and lifeless pompoms swaying in the breeze.
So to take in the last of the season, my wife, our dog and I took a walk and picnic lunch up to a local park in New York with a view of the rolling hills that define our area. But while I was looking up and out at the trees, my wife was looking down and around for mushrooms.
“I can’t believe all the mushrooms here,” said my wife as we started out on our walk. She had just taken a course in drawing mushrooms at the New York Botanical Gardens and had been conditioned for the last month as a budding mycologist seeking to identify and understand every mushroom she came across. She had me snapping pictures all over the park at ankle level as that is where we found most of the mushrooms, though there were more than a few taking residence up on trees.
Our observations were not alone as newspapers all over the country have been writing about the excess of mushrooms, especially the giant puffball (which we did not find.) We found lots of others, however, and my wife is looking forward to drawing them.
Unlike the other three seasons, autumn is the most fleeting as its bounty goes as quickly as it abruptly arrives. A clean log is populated with a mass of mushrooms a few days later. It is impossible to predict when and where they will show up. Many of these mushrooms look tasty and we fantasized about stir frying some with our dinner. But as neither of us have been trained to identify mushrooms, we decided to take a miss as while these fungi are beautiful they could also be very deadly. Better to just take a picture.
