Morel mushrooms winning today: Morels 19, Wood Ticks 2

Three morels in a row!

This morning, early, I headed to the morel mushroom hunting grounds determined (well, hoping and wishing) to find at least enough for tonight’s dinner.  It was a rousing success!  Nineteen of the beauties, some of them rather large, are soaking in sea salt for our late-afternoon feast. 

After dinner I have an appointment with some of our book club members for a nature walk, so today is going to be an outdoor day all around.  With some wood-splitting sandwiched in between during the afternoon.

The tiniest little forget-me-not. Let's not forget her.

Lots more blossoms were appearing all over the woods.  Ducks floated on the pond.  The sun shined bright in the blue sky.  Red-wing blackbirds trilled their sweetest notes.  I remembered to look all around instead of staring fiercely at the ground with the thirst of the hunt.  (Well, at least some of the time I wasn’t staring fixedly at the dried ferns looking for the beauties poking up in between…) Yesterday, it snowed.  Quite a change this morning.

Apple blossoms against a bright blue sky

On the way home (lots to do today so couldn’t just meander endlessly looking for more mushrooms or pausing swamp-side to relax and dream) I saw a small mound on the earth.  Here’s the photo.  It looks rather ordinary, I know.  Just a small mound made of soil on the ground.

One small mound of earth

It actually reminded me of one of my earliest childhood memories about nature.  My best friend Carol and I were fairly young, maybe in early elementary school, and her dad took a passel of us kids for a walk back in the woods.  We were too young to be back that far by ourselves. 

As we walked along, he pointed to a nondescript hump on the ground and casually said, “You know what that is?”  We all shook our heads no.  We didn’t know.

“It’s a buffalo grave,” he said.  And then proceeded to show us small clinking white teeth from that buffalo grave, which he just happened to be carrying in his pocket. 

We really didn’t believe him, because he tended to be a bit of a jokester.  But we didn’t quite know.  It MIGHT be a buffalo grave.  Maybe all those little hills in the woods were graves of dead buffalo.  It added to the mystery of the forest for years after.  You never knew what this mound of soil might be, or that little indentation.  (No matter that buffalo never roamed around Michigan…you never knew…maybe it was pre-glacial activity!)

Just wanted to share that childhood memory with you.