TW: imagery surrounding illness + death
1. Consume the urban undergrowth. Mount Auburn was like no other cemetery. Filled with wandering spirits, it was a home rather than a prison. Nine year old me would always hold my breath when passing other graveyards – preferring my lungs give out than allowing a spirit to hitch a ride with me. As I grew up alongside Massachusetts, much of my homeland had begun to feel slightly eerie. History and nostalgia surrounded me at every moment – baked into crumbling red brick buildings, growing wild with the disappearing oak forests, flowing downstream with mercury deposits in the Charles river. I felt in a state of constant, anguished wait, holding my breath for spirits and a loss far greater. Mt. Auburn, however, was my escape. Graves sat covered in moss, stones like bodies returning to the ground. The air was thick with death but I embraced it with open lungs. Tombs were inviting. One of them looked like the entrance to my childhood home with vines trailing the sealed doorway and neon graffiti etched in the ancient rock. I never went inside. I drifted alongside the spirits through winding wooded trails as hawks and rabbits and deer crossed my path, and a flash of red passed by me as one of the dead danced through the trees. Upon closer inspection, it was a grove of red chanterelles, seeping like blood from damp soil below. Dinner. I began to pick them one by one, each sleepy little corpse falling with a thud into my basket. They must have burst forth in just that last week, feeding off the rain brought by Hurricane Sandy and the decaying bodies beneath them. I didn’t take them all, but by the time I was done my basket was spilling over.
I had begun to learn ways that you could distinguish a deadly mushroom from an edible one. One was to look at the dusty paintings they made when pressed to a piece of paper, called a spore print; I could run my fingers along their upside down umbrella shapes to see if their gills were real or false; I understood how to detect a slight difference in color. With all I learned, I knew that chanterelle mushrooms prefer places like Mt. Auburn, where the soil is overturned often and there is plenty of organic matter for their mycorrhizae to feed on. They also like water.[1] After a rainstorm, their fruity scent fills the air as they sprout. After Hurricane Sandy, you couldn’t walk twenty feet without running into one of these inconspicuous, sweet smelling, orange-red creatures. One had caught my eye -- the runt of the litter. Grooves coated its underbelly, filled with spirits and spores awaiting their rebirth. They caressed my fingertips and I read their tactile words. As I plucked the mushroom from the earth like a delicate flower, it alerted me to what I was standing on: a family friend's gravestone. Millions of stories buried just beneath the soil. I had forgotten her death for quite some time, or just pushed it away. She was our neighbor for many years, living in the red brick building next to my childhood home, and becoming more like family with each passing year. She had died from cancer, it had invaded her body and turned it against her, just as it does for more and more people each year.[2] My mom had cancer from the sun seeping through the ozone hole, my grandfather from the smog of the trains he worked on, my distant cousin from watered down chemicals seeping out of a uranium mine. I am still scared I will be next. Memento mori, her gravestone read. Remember that you will die. Ironic. My fingers brushed dirt from its surface, and I returned to my mushrooms. Returning home, I couldn’t get it off my mind. My friend, my mushroom, tumbled around my grandmother’s cast iron pan in a rage of scalding oil. Was she angry at me for who I consume? Or, that I had waited so long to remember? The rest of the red fungi bounced around her as I pushed them with my blood-stained wooden spoon. The aromatics that filled the room were drool worthy, with swirling sweetness of onion and garlic embracing acidic droplets of lemon juice. In another dish sat tomatoes harvested from the backyard garden, next to slow-cooking spaghetti made from wheat that was grown a million miles away. The menu for the night: the past. Each plate formed a ritual, and by the end I was both a chef and a priest. And just the year before I had been too young to be in the kitchen. Now: a twirl of pasta, a dash of oil, a few tomatoes, and a heaping pile of mushrooms. My sister sprinkled blessings of parmesan on top with a delicate hand, and I watched the magic as death became both beautiful and delicious. As I ate, I was nourished with the memory of plucking fungi from the ground, with the scent of chopped garlic that stuck to my hands for days, with the warmth that filled my stomach. Spirits grew strong and chalky in my mouth. My friend embraced me, her past extending its arms out in welcome as she burst forth from her mushroom. I was at peace, alongside her.
2. Cobwebs form in the forgotten. Amidst the bodies in the graveyard, another story was growing. White threads trailed miles below the surface of the earth, extending their tentacles out in all directions as they grasped across space and time. I was not alone. Mycelium is a kind of fungus that spreads in these spider-like webs beneath the forest floor, partnering with the plants above it. Its spores traverse the root systems of their allies, linking them together with their neighbors and building a community that shares water, chemicals, and energy. The trails of white that look much like a human nervous system can communicate distress signals; they tell older trees when their younger offspring are dying, and the community pitches in nutrients to save their kin.[3] Mycelium even makes up the largest living organism on earth – a two thousand acre network below a forest in Oregon.[4] However, I like to believe it connects far beyond this, through the depths of the earth and between the stories of time. As I consumed the little red mushrooms, I began to tune into the energy of this mystical conversation that was unfolding underground – one that had been going on long before I arrived, and will keep on long after I have gone. As I embraced the world of fungi, the mycelium connected to the tendrils of my neurons and I started to sense all the ways I could venture. One path among the mycelium web might lead back to the day my friend died, holding in its spindly grasp both her present decomposing body and the imprints of each footstep she took before returning to the earth. Another path, perhaps, could connect that tomb in the graveyard to my childhood home as they learned from each other and grew to be more similar than even I could tell. However, the one I followed led me almost ten years into the future, halfway across the world.
3. Don't forget your eggs, they will spoil if left in the sun. I was 16, living in California, when my mother left. I sat empty in a cold house as she moved to Arizona, baking in the summer heat while I awaited her return. Every passing day was a step away from her. I stopped calling, she stopped answering, and I often grieved her though she wasn't truly gone. Finally able to travel after the pandemic, I went to visit her the next year. Her eyes were different, glassy like those of my grandfather who she was living with. Her hair was grayed; there was no time here to dye the stress away. Patterns of the sun dotted her skin. After her cancer scare she had become obsessive about wearing sunscreen, but in the Southwest there was no escaping the UV rays. I'll come back soon, don't worry. That’s what she said as I boarded the plane back home. I was 18 when she died – not really, but it felt close enough to me. The sun had invaded her mind with the stress of a warming world and an unprecedented heat wave that boiled her blood until it couldn't be confined any longer. It burst forth from its prison and left her invisible, collapsed on the floor. When the paramedics came, my grandfather thought they were there for him. It wasn’t her time to go. She lay for 6 weeks in a cold bed in the ICU, yearning to decay back into the earth, surrounded by man-made machines. I moved to Arizona to watch over her and to take on her role as caretaker of my 95 year old grandfather. He said that summer was the warmest he had ever seen.[5] The Southwest is nothing if not surprising, though, and amidst the unprecedented heat came an equally odd monsoon – one stronger, earlier, and far more devastating than I ever knew.[6]
Outside my grandfather's window, a tiny green hummingbird built her nest on a day when the sun hit like a gust of wind and the rain washed the mountains away. My sister and I watched her return to it every day to care for her eggs, entranced with the now foreign idea of motherhood. I always felt that if her eggs made it, maybe my mom would too. The nest itself was strong from the twigs of the Palo Verde tree, woven tightly together by the stolen cat fur that danced like tumbleweeds in the yard, and finished with the cement-like dust of the desert. A perfect home. Arizona, however, was still in the midst of the heat wave. By mid April the eggs had boiled, and the mother hummingbird eventually stopped coming back. The last time I saw her, she had grief in her little glassy eyes. I sensed a familiar feeling returning; a deep anguish, an empathy for her sorrow and for the loss of the environment and normalcy I once knew. We took down her nest after a while, bored with the monotony of caring for others, and curiously examined the interior. With the post-heat-wave, week-long monsoon, water stuck to the air making it so thick it was hard to breathe, and soaked every dried up piece of earth until the flash floods came. The abandoned nest had been drenched. Water had invaded its insides, though the structure and the eggs remained intact. By the time we took it down, a mold had grown over top of it. Moist and warm, the nest grew habitat to this wild alien creature of disgust. The mold embraced it with open arms having no invitation to this place but creating a home no less. It was a fuzzy organism, turning the specimen into a wild being of its own, engulfing the long lost eggs and feeding off the grief of the mother and the heat and the rain and the death. The original shape was recognizable, but beyond that it was something entirely new. As I watched the metamorphosis, I was called back through threads of white neurons in my brain into the webs beneath the soil, brought back to a time long before this trauma. I still held in a pit in my stomach a knotted ball of red chanterelles, I still felt in my bones the nutrients from my past that would be fuel for my present, I still listened to stories of my youth and of the wild far beyond me. That little spot of mold, that rebirth of fungi, gave me hope for all to come. Spores of mold are in the air around us at all times, little droplets raining down on the earth, spreading their gospel across the world. They need proper food, moisture, temperate environments, and oxygen to grow – just like a human does. Once their seeds land in a new home, they multiply within a matter of hours. Mold is a nuisance more than anything; eating away at groceries left out too long or walls stewing in summer humidity. However, it’s also magical. It is an organism of its own unimaginable power, growing into the edges of humanity where it finds space. Much like trees and other organisms, the microscopic branches of mold, or hyphae, extend out their arms out into the world and send out their seeds, or spores, into the world. Some molds are even intelligent. Put a colony in a petri dish with a maze of objects and food at the end; the gangly fingers of the creature can work their way through the puzzle to get a reward.[7] Seeing it take over inspired me. The fungi invasion of the nest had also made my mom’s hospital room seem too clinical, too clean. I was plagued by dreams where mushrooms began to fruit from her sun-spotted, fragile skin. They would take her gently away like they did the nest, turning her into something new and wild, solving her eternal puzzle. But still; I'll come back soon, don't worry. And she did. Worried as I was about the death of the eggs as an omen, my mom recovered. She died and survived. I still grieve for her sometimes, the person she was before the heat wave, but I know that she grew again like fungi from the death she almost lived. We moved away from Arizona this year, and on the day I left I saw a hummingbird building a new nest in our backyard.