The Mushroom Forest

 

By Jill K. Sayre

 

We’d stay the night at Grandpop’s every spring break. He lived in a small blue house nestled in a perpetually green area in Northern California, where grey moss hung like tattered cloth from the boughs of surrounding oak trees. We’d get caught up over dinner, and I could hardly wait until the next morning when the fog rolled in and spread from the sky to the deepest part of the ivy that covered the fences and yard. I’d take an early walk to the end of his street, where a dirt path wound into the thicket of redwood trees, curling ferns tickling the base of their trunks. I wondered who had cut the narrow path, with one side a steep slope of greenery and the other a drop straight down to a trickling creek. Every so often, I’d have to climb over a fallen tree in my way, covered in green velvety moss, and I’d have to be careful not to get scratched by the pokey, magenta-topped thistles that lined the trail, but I didn’t care. I was on an astounding mission.

 

Often, I’d startle a family of deer resting amongst the foliage or munching on a breakfast of acorns, and sometimes, there would be tracks of coyotes along the damp byway. It took a good fifteen minutes to get there, but I savored every step through the beauteous place where birds sang, water splashed, and only I existed. The road bent sharply to the right, and once I passed the giant uprooted oak, its network of roots splayed like a vortex of snakes, I was there: the mushroom patch—domed heads, still and varied, congregating in browns, yellows, reds, and purples. Lacy-edged, butter-yellow chanterelles with tightly pleated gills and frilly edges climbed a nearby tree. Clumps of multi-tiered, beige domed oyster mushrooms, with thin bending stems and heads the size of a dime, were amassed in patches on the ground. Some trees had golden chicken of the woods oozing from a trunk crack, sprawling down between protruding roots. There were the eye-catching scarlet waxy caps in bright orange-red with larger pointy caps and ghostly white fairy parachute mushrooms with long, dainty stems, sprouted from moss-covered logs, flanked by clusters of turkey tails, leathery discs striped in variegated browns. And if I were lucky, there would be blewits besides the oak trees, flashing their deep lavender skin.

 

This was a gorgeous site, like an on-land coral reef, but I wasn’t there just to see the “mushroom village”—I’d come to see its residents. Yes, brown bunnies flashed the white underside of their tails as they sprinted by while a congress of wet, shiny, brown-speckled salamanders used their suctioned toes to travel from stem to leaf. And regal monarch butterflies flitted above the periwinkle flowers in the groundcover flanked by tufts of bright yellow sour grass dotted with red ladybugs. But I had come to see the other woodlanders. I sat on a stump at the edge of the “Valley of the Mushrooms,” where I’d breathe the damp, chilled air, watching light spattering the canopy, embracing the sound of buzzing insects and birds, squinting my eyes. Tiny winged diaphanous beings were blurs around me. It would be easy to mistake them for lacewings or tiny sphinx moths, but they were something else. They darted in and out of a large patch of my favorite mushroom of all, the cinnamon-colored, broad-topped candy caps that smelled like maple syrup.

 

I sat very still and waited, my heart filled with love and positivity, promising them no harm, and the minuscule creatures revealed themselves as what they truly were… fairies. I’d widen my eyes, watching them whiz around my head, giggling in my ears, and landing on those mushrooms that reminded me of the pancakes I’d be requesting for breakfast when I returned to Grandpop’s house. I tried not to overstay, although I’d lost my sense of time.

 

These annual visits occurred from age twelve to twenty-two, and I never showed it to or told anyone about it. It was my special place, my fantastical secret. But, one day, sweet Grandpop passed away. The house was sold that spring, and I lived 400 miles away, so all I could do was pack up his things. I spent that final night in his empty house, sleeping on the floor so I could have one last early morning forest visit. I woke just as the sun peeked its golden face above the horizon, walked down that path, climbed over the fallen trees, and sat on that stump.

 

Tears blurred my vision, and the fairies appeared, this time landing on my hands folded in my lap—one had to ditch a tear that plummeted down off my cheek. Dozens of miraculous wee ones gathered in my hair and on my shoulder, whispering a soothing sound that I could not describe or mimic but only feel. My heartache comforted, I wanted to stay there all day, but the sun was growing brighter, and I had to go, so I stood carefully, thanked them, and they dispersed.

 

As I turned to leave, one radiant candy cap mushroom caught my eye, and something told me to get out my phone and snap a picture beneath it. Then, I slipped the phone back into my pocket with mixed feelings of elation and melancholy. In the following days, I replayed that glorious morning repeatedly in my head, but it was almost a week before I remembered the photo. Sure, it would show nothing but the plicated gills of the mushroom, but I was surprised to see one tiny fairy posing, sitting sideways upon the stem, legs crossed, and wings unfurled. Whenever I feel the weight of missing Grandpop, I look at this photo, and my heart is light.

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