Magic mushrooms

A short post today...For the second time in as many weeks, I was puttering around the house in my sweats - the equivalent of my jammies, not prepared for company, when there was a call at the door. (Herb wants to know why I want to live off the beaten path and this is part of it.) I didn't have time to run upstairs and put on real clothes, and because I was feeling poorly the night before, and slept in, I must have looked a sight!  Anyway, it was my friend David, with someone whose name I had heard before, from the town of 500 people a bit east of here. He had a grocery bag (or is it a sack?) full of purplish mushrooms, picked up the hill behind the barn. Edible. Cool. We talked mushrooms for about a half hour. Walked over to the compost pile. Nothing there. But we walked up to where he had picked these babies for dinner, and found another type he couldn't identify and chose not to try to eat. He exhorted me to read and test and educate myself, but I am reluctant to be my own guinea pig. Still I will be making spore prints with these two types later today.

I am struck once again, at the way "learning" comes in the door here, or appears along the side of the road.  The Harvard educator John Stilgo has written "Outside Lies Magic" and he exhorts his students to walk and look, and see and listen. He asks them to examine manhole covers and the way the grass is patterned after a mowing, and the color of smoke from a chimney against clouds or blue sky--clues to what is being burned for heat.  Too often I spend entire days in my desk chair and the only learning I do is on a single screen.

I am thinking I need to get dressed earlier in the day, and walk, or put on a pot of tea for visitors. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop in.