molly mooching 79Lot. We know that only because our friends who grew up on this farm
showed us where to look. This is the kind of knowledge that gets lost if
people have to leave their land. Farmers aren’t just picturesque techni-
cians. They are memory banks, human symbionts with their ground.
My family is now charged with keeping the secret history of a goat, a
place, and a mushroom. Just as our local- food pledge had pushed us to-
ward the farmers’ market on the previous Saturday, it pushed us out the
back door on the following cold, rainy Monday. Morels emerge here on
the first warm day after a good, soaking mid- April rain. It’s easy to get pre-
occupied with life and miss that window, or to coast past it on the lazy
comfort of a full larder. This April our larder was notably empty, partly I
suppose for just this reason—to force us to pay attention to things like the
morels. Steven came home from his teaching duties, donned jeans and
boots, and headed up toward Old Charley’s Lot with a mesh bag in hand.
Mushroom ethics mandate the mesh collecting bag, so the spores can
scatter as you carry home your loot.
No loot was carried that day. We really knew it was still too cold. We’d
had snow the previous day. But we were more than usually motivated, so
on Tuesday in only slightly nicer weather, Steven headed out again. I was
mending a broken leg that spring and could not yet navigate the steep,
slick mountainside, so I was consigned to the wifely role of waiting for
Man the Hunter to return. After the first hour I moved on to the wifely
custom of worrying he’d fallen into a sinkhole. But no, he eventually re-
turned from the woods, empty- handed but intact. He was just being thor-
ough.
On Wednesday he went out again, and came back through the kitchen
door with a conspicuous air of conquest. Triumphantly he held up his
mesh bag: a few dozen fawn- colored, earthy, perfect morels. It wasn’t a
huge catch, but it was big enough. By the weekend there would be more,
enough to share with our neighbors. I grinned, and went to the refrigera-
tor. A little while earlier I’d gone up to the garden and returned with my
own prize lying across my forearm like two dozen long- stemmed roses:
our most spectacular asparagus harvest ever.
We put our Mollies in a bowl of salt water to soak briefly prior to cook-
ing. I’m not sure why, but our mushroom- hunting friends say to do this