Morels

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers. A tree has fallen across the path you and your father carved out three years ago, back when he could lift the chainsaw without shaking. Today, he holds only a bucket and won’t let you carry it, though you know his left side is numb. The Laetiporus on the tree trunk is orange but unripe, and the puffballs you saw near the rusted, stripped Camry a hundred feet back are bloated with spores, too mature for the butter and garlic baptism you would have given them at supper. Summer and Fall battle over the maples’ chlorophyll, but the trees’ shadows do not change. Your father says this is the week for morels, so you must help him harvest before the mosquitoes die and the ticks vanish. Before the longlegs curl up dead and the hummingbirds depart and the wasps slumber in their paper nests and before he shakes too much to hold anything at all, even a bucket. He still hasn’t told you how to identify morels. You don’t know how you’ll find them when he’s gone.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.