Fallen Mushroom

After three solid days of rain, the creek is running once again. We know this because we can hear it, so we walked down there to have a look. I found some beautiful mushrooms growing out of a log down there a couple of years ago, but have never seen another one since.

The number and variety of mushrooms around here is amazing, but it's been so dry that they've been scarce lately. Walking back from the creek, I detoured up our front lawn to have a look at a large colony of rather ordinary white mushrooms that popped up there overnight. On closer inspection, I loved the underside of an uprooted one with its pale pink gills.

A fallen mushroom seemed a much more palatable blip than a butchered deer carcass which somebody wrapped in a tarp and dumped in our field. Neither OilMan or I felt inclined to investigate the bit of black hair we could see protruding from one corner of the tarp, so we called the sheriff.

A deputy arrived after dark, ruled out the possibility that it was a human corpse and told OilMan, who had worked up the courage to walk up there with a flashlight, that we were therefore "responsible" for it. He was a nice young man, and a deer hunter, and responded to OilMan's helpless what-are-we-supposed-to -do-with-it? look by saying that since it isn't deer hunting season, it would have been poachers, who did it, and that if we just waited a few days, nature would take its course, and the coyotes, foxes, vultures and who knows what else would reduce it to bones and a rather nice set of antlers.

Aah, the rural life….