Driving to the mountains to celebrate our wedding anniversary, wild mushrooms and late-season ripeness in the high country, Rose suggests putting on a record (the Luddite doesn’t fall far from the tree). We insert the mixed tape I made Dan in 1995, called “Songs For Your 24th Year.” Every song is still ours, and we sing loudly, wondering at what point this embarrasses, rather than enlivens, the kids.
Late-season mountains: The mosquitoes are mostly gone, wildflowers are mostly gone (save for bright purple gentians popping in the sea of tawny grasses). Just being among the withering mountain plants exhaling their sweet, heady ripeness, feels like attending the ceremony: change.
We head out each day with basket, knife and mental search images of chanterelle and bolete mushrooms. Voices ring out through the spruce trees, “Here’s one! Oh, here’s another!” Rose finds oozing hot pink fungi and tells me, “If I liked mushrooms, I’d eat the pink ones.”
We don’t find chanterelles, but eat boletes (porcinis) with every campfire meal. They taste like slippery meat and squiggle around our mouths, activating tastebuds that have been asleep since last August.
We tell the kids, “Eleven years ago, right now, we were driving the truck, all gussied up, heading to our wedding.”
“Was I in the backseat?” Rose asks.
“Eleven years ago now, we were dancing,” we tell them, “all of us, even Baba.”
“I remember that part,” Col says, nodding.
I know what they mean, it seems crazy that they weren’t there. Crazy that the biological undertow pulling me down in my late 20s, thrumming “have baby now have baby now” didn’t include a sneak preview of these actual children, whose very faces reflect the fire light, their presence as solid and immutable as Sheep Mountain looming over our camp.
We sit at the campfire for hours, children on our laps (why do we even bring four camp chairs?) begging for stories from our childhoods.
Mine are all recounts of rule-breaking sugar-fests, and the kids gasp and giggle admiringly as if beneath my Mama-uniform I’m actually the Superhero of Naughtiness.
Dan, as usual, balances everything out with wholesome tales of eating enormous after-school bowls of Ramen with his doting grandma.
The kids snuggle in tight and request “more stories, more!” enjoying the unlimited access to parents who have nothing much to do other than add a log to the fire and tailor stories to their precise delight.
Throughout the weekend, I keep thinking, as we find, clean, slice and eat more mushrooms, “What a wild mushroom trip we’re on with the kids,” which makes me giggle as I squeeze Rose’s hand, wending through the trees, eyes on the ground.
We pop boletes in the basket, Col finds an owl feather, Rose shares every thought that scrabbles across her mind, the kids complain about hiking, Col loses the Swiss army knife I gave him approximately 37 hours earlier, the mountain plants lay their weary, spent heads down. And I am certain this wild mushroom trip with the kids, this life, is all I ever wanted.
Reach Rachel Turiel at sanjuandrive@frontier.net. Visit her blog, 6512 and growing, on raising children, chickens and other messy, rewarding endeavors at 6,512 feet.
