Nature Connection: A Fern, A Tree, Some Mushrooms And Some Magic

This past week I’ve been wandering and wondering and writing in Brewster in my old stomping grounds at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. I’ll write more about that next week, but as we walked into the beech forest across the street from the museum I was instantly steeped in a tea of memory so multilayered and multiflavored I felt transported to another time and place.

If you’re a regular reader of my column it won’t surprise you to learn that I often talk to plants and stones and chipmunks along my way. If you’re a nature lover moved to awe and appreciation that stops you for a moment to catch your breath, you, too, may have said to the glorious yellow ferns, “Oh, I will miss you and your flamboyant fronds, yellow fern. I’ve watched you grow since you were a mere fiddlehead, poking your tender, furry self out of the still cold spring mud. And look at you now, teaching that age is golden, something to be celebrated, embraced before, as they say, you give up the ghost. But like a good ghost, you will return.”

I move on and note that the poison ivy is yellowing as are the leaves of the sweet pepper bushes. The white asters, however, the bright stars of the autumnal forest floor, still shine in the dappled sun reaching down through the trees.

I spy a golden mushroom, slug bitten around its edges but still erect in spite of this insult. A hollowed-out tree trunk still stands as a shrine to both courage and resignation. Bark has sloughed off and sits on the rain dampened ground, a new home for salamanders, perhaps, or a warty toad seeking shelter. 

Beetle trails and woodpecker holes work their way across the silvered wood, bared to years of elements both kind and otherwise. I wonder about this skeleton of a tree I’ve known almost all my life. I remember when it fell, when the top of the remaining trunk fell several years later, and when the former top sank into the ground covered with moss. I’ve seen birds, mice, chipmunks and more insects than I can name here, and yet we are still strangers to each other.

I walk endlessly, restlessly, but this old tree trunk reminds me that the answers may lie in stillness, so I stand before it, joining in its silence and acceptance of the day.

I can see the velvety green of moss against the brown of fallen oak leaves, another story of persistence and faith. Acorns roll across the path, one stopped by my shoe as I stand like a tree in the woods. I note lichen and moss competing for dominance on a rock, but the rock has not given in to their tiny but persistent roots and for the moment they are all living in harmony.

Crows call as they fly overhead and a sweet rhythmic chorus of crickets accompanies the breezes passing through the treetops. The yellow of cat brier against the lime green leaves not yet turned blends nicely with the orange and red leaves of huckleberry.

The more I look, the more I see, all standing in one spot here by the old tree trunk. Mushrooms rise from the dampness paying no heed to leaves, pine needles, old grasses or twigs that should be in their way. So well camouflaged are they that it took 10 minutes of gazing at the ground to see them and suddenly I noticed them everywhere.

Mushroom caps, caught somewhere between liquid and solid, push forth and unfurl, opening to discs of various colors. Some are red, some are yellow, some are white, and others are orange, black or brown. All around me is an artist’s palette of fungi.

Some caps are bitten and half consumed before they’ve fully emerged. They stand a bit crooked, missing parts of themselves but adamantly taking their place on the forest floor, nonetheless.

They humble me, these quiet sentinels of the fall forest. Connected below the earth by a vast network of thready white mycelium, they live in silent community. If only we could do the same.

A white-breasted nuthatch calls and circles a tree only a few feet away. Two downy woodpeckers chase each other, arguing loudly as they do so. Chickadees and a titmouse work the bushes around me, and a chipmunk runs by with an acorn in its mouth. What at first appears to be a quiet place is quite full of life, and what I can see and hear is only a fraction of what is actually here. 

The mushrooms and trees cannot walk but alas, I can, and I must leave this peaceful moment and place behind. I brush my hand across the yellow ferns as I do.

“Thank you,” I whisper. A breeze whispers in my ear and I smile. There is magic everywhere. We just need to be willing to slow down and let it happen.