When I first arrived in the Czech Republic, one of my students mentioned that she liked picking mushrooms. I thought then how beautiful a hobby that must be: surrounded by woods, tracking down those delicious morsels of food, the rich smells of nature in your nose.
I saw these mushrooms for myself on my many hikes, sometimes fifteen varieties or more sprouting from the forest floor. Clusters of tiny white mushrooms. Big frilly black ones that seemed to melt away into a shiny mush that filled my senses. Yellow-orange creations that looked like coral.
Classic fairytale toadstools, red with white spots. Plate-sized caps you can apparently bread and fry like schnitzel, if you know what you’re doing. Gilly ones, spongy ones, puffballs that looked like they'd disintegrate into chalk dust the moment you touched them.
I never went hiking with friends who knew their mushrooms, and I never dared pick them on my own. My second year passed the same. Mushroom season turned into winter, then spring, summer. Suddenly it was my last day in my beloved town, and I still hadn’t gone mushroom hunting. August ninth it was, and my landlord came by to do a little business.
Over the course of that year I‘d become friends with the whole delightful family: Vlád’a, super intelligent yet child-like in his enthusiasm for everything, who scaled back on his pharmaceutical work in order to raise sheep in the Wallachian hills; Pavla, who organized a Spanish conversation club and tried to teach me how to cook a goose on the old-fashioned wood-burning stove in the traditional house they'd built; three kids who loved getting to school in the winter by snowmobile.
Mushroom Picking and Guitar Playing
