Our Strangers by Lydia Davis

Author:Lydia Davis [Davis, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: bookshop.org
Publisher: Bookshop Editions
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Person Asked Me

About Lichens

* * *

A person asked me, had I ever written about lichens? He thought I was the kind of person who would be interested in lichens and enjoy thinking about them. He judged that because he knew of my interest in moss, seeds, pollen, leaves, soil, insects such as wasps, ants, ladybugs, and sawflies, and also spiders, particularly daddy longlegs, who have such very small heads to contain intelligence and such thin legs to contain anything like muscles. It was perfectly true that I would be interested in lichens, but the fact was that I had paid very little attention to them up to then. There are lichens growing on my apple trees and crab apple trees, and I had worried that this was a bad sign. A friend who used to grow apple trees professionally told me I did not have to worry about the lichens growing on the trees. I had only that summer become particularly interested in the wildflowers that came up in my yard, and in fact in all the wild plants that came up—most of which flowered, of course, sooner or later, though in some cases inconspicuously. Along with that interest, or coming soon after it, I began to pay more attention to mushrooms. I had always noticed the mushrooms that sprouted, suddenly, overnight, here and there in spots of their own choosing, often after a rain or some prolonged damp weather, sometimes in spots that puzzled me, that I would not have chosen, had I been a mushroom, such as at the very edge of my asphalt driveway—though, of course, when I thought about it, had I really been that type of mushroom I would have chosen precisely that spot. Other spots made more sense to me, though I know very little about mushrooms, only, perhaps, that they are actually the fruit of some sort of long underground stems—in other words, that they are only the outward, surface sign of a much larger living organism, an idea that is a little frightening. But of course what happens below the surface of the soil is very complex and on a large scale, or I should say on a small scale, but vast, if that makes any sense, invisible to us and mostly unknown to most of us. In any case, after years of only noticing mushrooms, usually admiring, sometimes marveling at them, I learned that without much trouble I could grow them myself. I thought I would need a rotten log or a pile of wood chips, which I had, and some spores which I could order to be delivered here. I decided not to do it this year, since I was busy already with various new plantings, but I would do it the following year. I had also been given a small book by a dear friend that showed different types of mushrooms, with clear line drawings and descriptions, and symbols indicating whether the mushroom was safe to eat. I began to look up in this book the mushrooms that appeared in the yard.

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