A Walk In The Woods

Cottonwood

 Across from our five acre lot lives a forest.  It isn't very big and it technically falls under the jurisdiction of my sister and brother-in-law, but it calls to me in the spring.  Fifteen acres of maple, cotton wood, elm, and poison ivy and I love it.  I only haunt the woods in the spring, mainly because during the winter it is too cold to go on a leisurely walk and during the summer I am too frantic with getting things done in the garden to actually take the time for an amble.....but ambling in the spring is ideal. 

There are many of us that get sucked into the wooded lots in Iowa at this time of year and there is one particular thing that many of us are after.....the ever elusive Morel mushroom.

Trametes versicolor

If you have never eaten a Morel that has been sauteed in butter and seasoned with Cavender's greek seasoning then, quite honestly, you haven't really lived.  But only half the fun is eating them.  The other half is the hunt. 

Hunting for a Morel is a definite challenge.  There are many times, while walking through the woods, that I think it would be much easier to hunt animals than mushrooms.  So far this year I have come across rabbits, turkeys and deer, but the mushrooms have been very scarce.  Morels are a fickle mushroom, like many of their fungi friends, they need exacting conditions of temperature, moisture and humidity in which to grow and for all the research that I have done on these mushrooms, no one seems to have a very good handle on exactly what makes them tick.  Therefore, I constantly walk in the woods. 

I usually start sometime near the beginning of April.  Not because I think that they will actually be out yet, it is entirely too early for them to show up, but it is nice to just walk and notice the changes that take place as spring emerges.  There are many times when walking through the woods that I don't actually look down at the ground for mushrooms at all, but rather at the trees and the state of their buds.  I make note of the trees that have fallen during the winter and marvel at the number of deer trails that have emerged like small highways making the paths through the forest that much clearer.  I note the level to which the garlic mustard, an invasive plant, has taken over the woods and I ponder at what point there will come a virus or bacterium that will infest this noxious plant and render it less obnoxious to the forest flora.  I walk with folded arms most of the time to avoid touching all the small twigs of trees that grow two or three feet off the ground for I have learned that these are poison ivy plants that haven't leafed out yet and although they don't have leaves they are still poisonous and will give a person a tremendously horrible rash.  I listen to the song birds calling and to the frogs chirping in the wetlands just to the north of the woods.  The smell of earth and dirt is strong in the woods in the spring - all the slowly rotting vegetation and leaf molds from the previous fall make the earth very spongy under foot.

All it takes is looking down a little closer at all the vegetation and suddenly mushrooms of every kind and color become visible.....all of them that is, except the Morel. 



Trametes versicolor



Puff Ball



Devil's Urn



Morels are elusive.  I picture them being very similar to leprechauns - there one minute, but gone the next.  They blend in with the leaves that cover the ground and they hide in the tall grass or the rose bushes.  I feel sometimes as though I am trying to "sneak up" on them so that they won't know that I am looking for them.  Sometimes I feign nonchalance while walking through the wood in the hopes that they will be lulled into a sense of security and come out of hiding.  When the time is right....they do.  It usually happens when I have decided to take a quick jaunt through the woods without something to carry any finds home in - those are the days that the mushrooms are many in number as though mocking my ability to hold them all on the way home. 

There is essentially something very satisfying about finding edible things in the wild that you know are incredibly delicious and safe to eat - it fills some long distant hunter/gatherer instinct of being able to know, recognize, and appreciate the earth's bounty.  And the walk through a peaceful, transcendent woods gives perspective and hope that there really is a little magic left in the world.





This Old House

I have undertaken a project. I don't do this too often in this house because I am definitely no expert.....Keith is. He handles the house projects and I handle any of the medical emergencies that arise with the pets. Seems like a fair trade. I have a tendency to be a little impatient with getting things done so I don't take the proper time or care, not to mention the fact that I rarely use the correct tool for actually doing something. I have found that flat screwdrivers can be used for just about everything from opening a paint can top to fishing out toast from a toaster (provided it is unplugged and the toast is no longer on fire)

That said, I took on this job. It started by painting the room while Keith was away. I did it as a surprise for him while he was gone working at my brother's house for a week. I did it while he was away (and called it a surprise) because he would have hovered and fretted over whether or not I cleaned the brushes out well enough after I was finished with them. This sort of "hovering and fretting" drives me absolutely nuts and is part of what prevents me from taking on other jobs. So, I did it while he was out of town.

Problem was, the paint job looked too good when I was done.....it made the floor look terrible. I mean, before when the wall was bad at least the floor looked the part, but now there was such a difference that it just would have killed me to move the stuff in there with the floor looking that bad. So, after Keith came home and had a chance to inspect the room and declare the paint job "good" and also verify that his brushes were in fact clean enough, he agreed that the floor needed something.

I have always favored the idea of refinishing the floors. This is an old house - 101 years to be exact, but the floors upstairs are pine.....wide plank, pine floors and Keith was generally in favor of just painting them again and calling it good. I volunteered to do the work - "I'll sand and stain them" I offered - that was only fair right? And so it began and Keith was nice enough to get me a new sander and set me up with the proper tools which is a very good thing or I would still be at it with a single piece of 20 grit and a flat screwdriver.

At first it was just a job, one of countless projects to be done on this house before it is technically habitable. I figure we will get it completed about the time that the kids all grow up and move away, much like my own parents did. Slowly, the layers of paint came off and the wood emerged and slowly it dawned on me how old this house really is. The smell of old wood is not something that can be easily explained. I realized what it was when I walked into the room to work one day and was suddenly transported back to my grandparent's attic in their South Dakota farm house which was also made of old wood. One hundred and one years ago.....1909 - before my grandparents were born, this house was finished by Meyer's construction, as evidenced by the name of the builders and the date that was found on one of the beams in the attic....that is a long time to imagine. No motorized vehicles, no television, no e-mail, no electricity....old.

I wonder who the people were that built the house. They were probably in their twenties or thirties. Did they have families? Where are those families now? As I was cleaning out cracks in the floor that have now dried and split enough to allow entrance to necklace beads and crayons and other small child paraphernalia, I would come across the head of a nail that had been hammered in generations ago.

Where will I be in 100 years? Will I have left anything of any lasting importance behind when I go, like these men did? Will there someday be someone who is refinishing this same floor and wondering who the last person was to sand and stain it? It is a humbling thought to think that I may not leave anything of any real importance in this world. But then again, I am leaving my children to it and, with any luck, my grandchildren.

As with any tedious job, this one moves slowly, but I feel as though I know each board individually. Which led me to another realization. I was moving some of the trim boards around one day and I managed to get a wicked splinter in the outside edge of my foot.

Have you ever attempted to take a splinter out of the outside edge of your foot? It requires some amount of Cirque du Soleli maneuvers. But as I was fishing the splinter out, it dawned on me that this wood was probably two hundred years old! The wood that would have made up that room had to have grown for quite a while prior to being harvested, dried and cut for flooring. Two hundred years! 1809! Shortly after we gained independence from England, before the war of 1812. The forests that made this floor was likely standing during the time of my great, great grandparents and before all the Native Americans had even left the area.

Now, I realize it isn't Pompei. It hasn't been around for thousands of years, but even something as old as this floor, in the Midwest is encouraging - maybe things we build really can stand the test of time, weather the storms, and still be useful. I know there are many that like "new", but unfortunately, in today's age that also tends to equate with "fast" and I have yet to see a new fast house stand up to any serious time. I am also a big fan of natural materials....wood and stone. The "new" vinyl siding that the previous owner slapped up fast sometime in the 80s is now completely ruined, but the wood that we uncovered under part of it was just fine.....needed some paint, but otherwise fine. It had been there for almost 80 years with the same rain and sun that the vinyl had been exposed to and failed to stand up to.

I understand the new and improved mentality, but have yet to actually find anything "improved" upon in most cases. I see most people living in subdivisions where all the houses essentially look the same - all have the big garage out front and some variation of "greige" color, ....where is the originality? Where is the individualism? Where is the craftsmanship? I understand that most of the houses built in the early 1900s were also very similar, but they took their time, used excellent materials, and, I will let you in on a little secret that I have learned while living with an architect that has also done construction work, the older houses are cheaper AND better built! Yep, most people don't want to live in the "old" section of town, but would rather have the "new" house in the new subdivision. It is entirely possible that in 60 years, chances are very good that the "new" house will have been razed to the ground and rebuilt due to some design or construction flaw at least once, while the old house will still be standing.

So, I applaud the men that built this house (and the man that continues to build this house), their time, their skill, and their patience. I think of them often and can only hope that the next few owners of the house walk into this particular room and marvel, if only briefly, at the floor and all the work that it must have taken to make it look so nice.