A Walk Near Home

Five stops on a walk I've made a hundred times, and the mushrooms that were waiting at each one

I don't need a trailhead to go looking. Most of what I know, I learned close to my own house, on a loop I could probably walk with my eyes closed by now. It rained last night, which meant this morning was worth the extra twenty minutes, so I took the long way instead of the short one.

The lawn by the Hendersons' place

Right past the mailbox, there's a shaded stretch of lawn that never quite dries out, and after a night of rain it's always the first place anything shows up. This morning it was a small cluster of meadow mushrooms pushed up through the grass, pale caps, still a little damp, exactly where they always are. Nothing dramatic about them. They're just there, the way they're there most wet mornings if you bother to look down.

The log at the edge of the woods

Past the last house, the lawn gives way to trees, and there's a fallen log lying across the old fence line that's been there longer than I've lived nearby. I sat on that log once, years ago, just to catch my breath, and happened to look down and notice a shelf of oyster mushrooms growing right along the underside of it, close enough that I could have reached down without standing up. I think about that every time I pass it now. This morning they were back, a little smaller, tucked into the same stretch of bark.

The old oak

Further in, there's an oak that's easily the oldest tree on the loop, wide enough at the base that it takes a few strides to walk around it. Right over there, when I was a kid running a trapline with my grandfather, I caught my first raccoon — I still remember exactly where the trap sat, more or less at the tree's roots. This morning there was a scatter of umbrella polypore fanned out at the base, the kind that shows up in that same spot most years like it's keeping the tree company.

Down by the creek

The trail dips down toward a shallow creek after that, and the ground gets soft and the rocks along the bank get slick — I've gone down more than once here, so I always slow down through this stretch. Along the damp bank, half-hidden under a hardwood near the water, there was a wrinkled thimble-cap, pale and a little ragged-looking, exactly where you'd expect one after a spring rain like this. Not something I'd ever bring home. Just something worth noticing on the way past.

Near the stump

The last stretch before the loop comes back around passes an old stump a little further down the trail, low and half-rotted into the ground. And there it was — a good-sized shelf of hen of the woods, ruffled and gray-brown, tucked right against the base like it had been waiting for me to come around the bend. I stood there a minute deciding whether to take it or leave it for whoever came by next. In the end I didn't think too hard about it. It'd be a nice treat when we get back home.

None of this was a special trip. It's the same walk I take most weeks, and most weeks it doesn't turn up anything worth writing down. But paying attention to a place you already know well is its own kind of habit, and it's the same habit I've written about elsewhere — the kind of quiet attention that experience alone doesn't guarantee, and the kind I still think is worth getting into the right hands before it matters more than it did this morning.