4/1/2020 – Anticipation

It’s now early April. I get on the computer and check a few of my regular sites. It started in March with some intermintent curiousity, but now I am checking on a daily basis. It’s nearly morel mushroom season, and I am constantly checking where they’ve been seen and reported. I check a map to see the progress: It starts in the Southeast US, slowly working it’s way north to me. I check a forum to see where Pennsylvania reports are and if they’ve started yet. It was a mild winter and it’s getting warm early this year, which is just further boosting my excitement to get out and find the first morels of the season. I check the soil temperatures, eagerly awaiting the ground temps to reach above 50 on a regular basis. I check the future weather, to see when it’s going to stay warm and if we’ll get any rain.

I’ve already been out walking around several times: To scout out new areas, and to check my early spots just in case. It’s starting to get green. Trees are budding. The wild leeks are up. I’ve already had dreams of morels. Ones where they are everywhere, ones where I was at private property and I shouldn’t have been picking them, ones where the morels get frosted and burned. The anticipation is real.

Part of that anticipation is the unknown factor. Morels are fickle. You never know if a season will be good or not. It comes down to the weather and the timing. It is a short lived season, lasting only a few weeks. Then the morels are gone, and the long summer months begin. I am hoping, with everything going on in the world, I will have a successful season.

It was the summer of 1999. I was a 10 year old boy. Looking back now, I couldn’t tell you much of anything that happened in that particular year of my life. I mean, I can’t even tell you what I had for dinner last week. I’m sure I was playing Ocarina of Time and searching for the triforce, and watching 90s cartoons on Nickelodeon on the weekends. But there is one event that I remember so distinctly, so vividly, that it feels it will forever be etched into my memory. My Dad, Mom, sister, and I were heading to our grandparents’ house, as we often did in the summers on the weekends. They have a large yard in a rural area of southwestern Pennsylvania. Something was a bit odd this time, however. There were several small holes poking through the ground. My Dad, quite the outdoors man, made it very apparent that something incredible was about to happen, and to really soak it in.  Read More