Mushrooms!

During my walks this season, I've been noticing these strange and beautiful things popping up--mushrooms! I haven't actually taken the time to stop and examine a mushroom since my childhood. I just remember those mushrooms appeared suddenly, usually after a rain, and usually sprung out of a stinking pile of the neighbor's dog sh*t on our front lawn. My parents always warned us that mushrooms growing in the wild like that (or as wild as lawns in the LA suburbs can be) were dangerous! and poison! There was always something about the threat of something being poisonous that we took very seriously. But the mushrooms were an irresistible object of curiosity, because they had just popped up overnight after all, and they were wondrous in their marshmallowy texture, in their gentle white perfection and in the fineness of the gills that lined their underbellies that begged touch and dissection. But there were the warnings after all, because we would DIE if we touched them, and we imagined with great deliciousness the horrible writhing deaths we would face if we even thought about putting them in our mouths. Yet the forbidden is always what attracts us, and there were those brave moments when we got close enough with a stick, ready to poke and prod, to pull back the mysterious cloak of their existence--only to be driven off in disgust by the sudden and overwhelming and pungent whiff of fresh dog crap. And so curiosity is trumped. Somehow by the end of the day the mushrooms had either shriveled back brown and black upon themselves, or had been kicked to pieces, thoughts of poisoning and danger as fleeting as the mushrooms.

And so, years later on one of my walks I notice this flash of color. Just a little something out of the ordinary. Turns out it's a mushroom, and though I've seen them before, I hadn't really stopped to SEE one. This one was beautiful. Smooth and creased like an ear, sensuous in its shape, delicate among the sharp dead leaves. I mean, how cool is that? And then I started looking for them, and there is something about the weather that's making them all pop up like little exclamation points in the landscape. And not out of piles of crap either. These mushrooms appear in the piles of rough and rotting and otherwise unremarkable stretches of dead leaves. Places where the spring grasses haven't sprouted yet. The dry spots under trees you ignore. I know absolutely nothing about mushrooms. I still don't touch them (except for that one irresistible one later on), but I have been enjoying discovering them. There are so many different kinds! And different colors and shapes and sizes and groupings. Some grow in gatherings of sloppy ellipses, and some appear singly in lonesome places, and others jump out of the earth one on top of the other, as if it were a race to get there first. Different varieties appear at different times, and the rains call them forth, and the rains melt them away. I'm just gonna post a bunch of pictures and let them speak for themselves, mostly.

Piles of mushrooms. These were some of the first!

This was the one I had to touch. Cool and smooth like a cold ear in the middle of the night.

Last year there was a large cluster of mushrooms that I called "Smurf Village." When we went to go look for it this year, all we found was Azreal, the Smurf's feline nemesis. No sign of the village at all.

This one looks like a tongue!

This weird one sprouted from the earth fully formed just like this!

These were so tiny they were easy to miss! They grew on mossy trees!

This is the same one as the one above, but a few hours later. Gone already.

Is this even a mushroom?

This little mother/daugher pair found us after a walk, just sunning themselves on a log.

And is this a mushroom?

These are really big, about the size and texture of pancakes, all growing out of a tree stump!

This one was the most bizarre of all! What the heck is it?