The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

Saturday came up clear and cool, the kind of April morning that smells like wet leaves and turned dirt. I picked up Grandma at seven thirty. She was already sitting on the porch in her black lace-up shoes, the red bandanna on her head, the lavender windbreaker zipped to her chin, and the onion sack folded on her knee.

Except it was not the onion sack. She had gone down to the farm store in Mount Sterling on Friday and bought two new mesh bags, the tan kind they sell for mushroom hunting.

“You carry them in mesh so the spores fall out while you walk,” she said when she saw me looking. “That’s how you get more next year. My mother taught me that.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“I know you know. I’m just saying it.”

We drove the long way around on the blacktop to Ferris’s lane. I did not want to go past Dusty’s paint, and I do not think she did either. Neither of us said why.

Ferris was waiting at his gate with Paisley. He had on the same overalls and the same cap, and he was leaning on a walking stick he had cut from a hickory sapling. Paisley had on a pink hoodie with the sleeves pushed up past the scratches.

“Marjorie,” Ferris said.

“Ferris,” Grandma said.

That was all, for a minute. They just looked at each other. Two people who had known each other sixty years and buried a husband and a wife between them.

Then Ferris said, “You’re late. Verla always had the first bag full by now.”

And Grandma said, “Verla always picked the false ones too, and I had to throw them out for her.”

And both of them laughed.

We went down the hill slow. Ferris went first with his stick, then Grandma with her cane and my arm, then me, then Paisley behind carrying the second mesh bag like it was the flag at a parade.

The path Ferris had cut went back and forth across the slope so it was never too steep. At the bottom, where it met the creek, he had laid two flat rocks across the soft spot so Grandma would not have to step in the mud.

“You did all this,” Grandma said.

“Paisley helped,” Ferris said.

“I dragged the brush,” Paisley said. “Grandpa did the cutting. I’m not allowed to use the saw.”

The mayapples were up all over the bottom, those little green umbrellas, so thick you could hardly see the ground in places. The creek was running clear and loud from the rain on Wednesday. The sun came down through the new leaves in patches, and everywhere it hit, the ground steamed a little.

Grandma stopped at the edge of the north slope and stood very still with her hand on my arm.

“There,” she said.

I did not see anything. I never do, at first. That is the thing about morels. You can look right at one and your eye goes right past it, and then all of a sudden you see one, and then you see six more around it, and you wonder how you ever missed them.