The Mushroom Pickers
A cluster of morel mushrooms (Morchella). Prized by gourmet cooks, especially in French cuisine. They grow abundantly in the wild each Spring, but morels are almost impossible to grow on farms.
Morels are America’s mushroom. The growing season is short, so they’re expensive. Chefs will pay $30 / pound. But each Spring, morels are abundant from the Deep South all the way up to Wisconsin and Northern Michigan. They live on the edges of forests.
They taste good. And they look cool. Like honeycombs. Or brains.
Farmers haven’t figured out how to grow them commercially, so there’s this whole subculture of morel hunters. They forage from March through May, and they’re reluctant to share secret spots.
I recently read a 1-minute story called The Mushroom Pickers, relayed by Simon Sarris, on his blog.
Dear friends, there is a tale,
One windy morning, two little girls were picking mushrooms. Since they spent all morning filling their baskets, they decided to take a shorter path home by crossing the railroad bridge. But as they climbed over the tracks of the bridge, the whistle of a train suddenly erupted. The elder ran back to safety, but the younger girl went forward. The elder cried out to her sister, “Hurry, keep going!”
But the noise of the oncoming train was so great that the younger sister could not hear, and thought she was being called back. As she ran towards her sister, the child tripped and scattered her mushrooms, which she hurriedly tried to collect.
“Leave them!” shouted the elder sister. But the younger sister heard nothing but the huffing and whistling of the train, and remained crouched hurriedly picking mushrooms from the tracks. As the train approached the mechanic was blowing the whistle constantly and waving his hat out the window. He could not stop the machine in time, and the train passed over the bridge.
The elder sister fell to her knees, crying and screaming, and passengers flooded the windows of the trains to see what became of the little girl.
The train finished passing, and the younger child lay motionless. Finally the roar subsided, and the tracks stopped shaking, so the little girl picked her head up, finished collecting her mushrooms, and ran to her sister.
Sophocles once said: One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.
I shared the story with someone I love, who asked.. “so what? Sounds like a girl just ducked under a train and everything’s back to normal?”
But I don't think everything went back to normal.
I think when the two sisters got home that evening, those mushrooms tasted different. Better. Maybe they told their parents what happened. Maybe they kept it a secret for decades. From that day forward, I think every time the big sister hugged her little sister she squeezed a little bit tighter.
Because things get scary sometimes.
But if we can survive the scary part, maybe it’s the very thing that makes the day more splendid in the end.
I think that’s the point.
The… morel of the story.
Note: Simon Sarris is a writer and software developer who lives in rural New Hampshire, and he writes about “anecdotes, fables, tales, advice, photography, questions, sentiment, and ways to get lost in the forest.”
If you’re interested, check out this piece on how to choose where to live.
