The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

Grandma saw them first. Grandma always sees them first.

“By the dead elm,” she said. “Three of them. Lacy, you’re standing on one.”

I was. I picked up my foot and there it was, a yellow morel as big as my thumb, a little smashed on one side.

“Don’t pull it,” Grandma said. “Pinch it.”

We worked that slope all morning. Grandma could not bend down well, so she would spot them and point with the end of her cane, and Paisley and I would pick. After a while Paisley got the hang of seeing them herself and would yell every time she found one.

“Grandpa! Here’s a big one! Here’s two!”

Ferris walked along behind us with his stick and did not pick much. He said his back was not what it used to be. I think mostly he wanted to watch Grandma.

Around ten o’clock we came to a big fallen ash with the bark sloughing off, and the ground around it was covered. Yellow morels and gray ones, some as big as a baby’s fist. Grandma let out a little sound I had not heard from her since before Grandpa died.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Verla would have loved this.”

“She’d have stepped on half of them,” Ferris said, and Grandma swatted at him with her cane.

That was where the tender part happened, the part I think about most.

Paisley was picking too fast. She was so excited she was grabbing them by the cap and yanking them up, roots and dirt and all. Grandma watched her do it two or three times. Then she said, “Honey, come here a minute.”

Paisley came over. Grandma took her hand, a ten-year-old’s hand in an eighty-seven-year-old one, and bent down as far as her knees would let her. I held her elbow.

“You pinch it right down at the ground,” Grandma said. “Like this. Right where the stem goes into the dirt. You don’t pull. If you pull, you tear up what’s underneath, and it won’t come back in that spot.”

She put Paisley’s thumb and finger on the stem of a gray morel and closed them, gently.

“Now pinch.”

Paisley pinched. The morel came off clean in her fingers, and the little white base stayed in the ground where it belonged.

“My mother showed me that in 1946,” Grandma said. “I was seven years old. We were down in the river bottom below our place, and I was pulling them up the way you were, and she took my hand just like this.”

Paisley looked at the morel and then at Grandma.

“So now I know it from your mother,” she said.

Grandma did not say anything for a second. Then she said, “Yes, honey. Now you know it from my mother.”

I had to look at the creek for a while.