in our yard, near the first podicarpus tree that grows, spiraling artifically around a bamboo stake, near the roots of that tree, one day there appeared a white lump. and then, five days later, that lump became ten large blooming mushrooms. by the sixth day, the umbrellae (plural?) of the mushrooms were opening upwards, fully exposing the fluting spores on the undersides. the pressure of the expansion out and up had torn the "heads" of the mushrooms; jagged gaps.
it was a spectacle for the kids. we didn't touch them for fear that we would damage their quick progression to their ends. i seriously entertained thoughts of sneaking out one night and using food coloring to turn them into super mario mushrooms or something. a surprise for willow and aiden in the morning. but the weather's been crappy for such an enterprise (but perhaps perfect for the mushrooms): very rainy.
where do mushrooms come from, anyway? sure, from spores. but where do the spores come from? were they latent in the soil, and just waiting for the right conditions? a generous soaking? or did they somehow alight from a distance, perhaps even from outer space (yeah, i know, cooky science fiction bs: body snatcher paranoia). maybe martian spores floated across the distance of space after having been ejected a millenia ago; and only now they had infected a cloud, and from there, infected my front yard...
they grow so fast. at odd moments, when i stare at them, i can almost see them expanding. so these were what mushroom clouds got their names from, these rising, spreading things...
... i'm feeling fungal nowadays... we connote "fungus" with decay, appropriately so. but although we usually think of decay as some slow process, our front yard mushrooms demonstrate that "fungus" is anything but slow. like a mushroom cloud. boom flash gone.
the suddenness of my appreciation of the dreariness of my life (not that it is dreary, but somehow my taste buds go bland, my eyes feel like they've got condensation and sleep sand in them)... it is like these mushroom clouds blooming in my yard... near dozen of them all waiting to pop their quick disintegrating destruction within my soul...
god, give me inspiration, integration, something to save me from the fallout...
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