49 ~ Searching for a morel in this story

This year the month of May has been a rough one for the gardens, both very dry and cold. Hard frosts here Friday and Saturday nights (May 29 & 30!), despite the deployment of coverings, hammered my infant tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. Earlier frosts took out my first plantings of cabbage, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. Things can now only get better, right? (he says naively).

The dry, cold spring also kept morels at bay. For the first time in years, I didn’t collect a single one. It was the second very poor year in a row for those sublime coneheads (last year was apparently the worst morel season in a generation).  I finally found a half-dozen last week, but they were already in decay. Too little and too late. These may be known forever as the ‘pandemic morel years’. 

If history is any guide, next year could be a boomer. The end of World War II was immediately followed by one of Bordeaux’s greatest vintages, 1945. Château Mouton-Rothschild commissioned a special ‘year of victory’ label for its wine that year.  And in fact, the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild is a legend, and considered one of the greatest red wines ever made. If we really can put the pandemic behind us, then perhaps next year the morels, inshallah, will take inspiration from the grapes.

In the meantime, I’ve followed the old ‘when life hands you lemons…’ routine and pivoted to something that has been abundant in the woods this spring - beautiful, lemon-yellow oyster mushrooms. It’s said that to eat colorfully is to eat healthily (presumably excluding jelly beans and Slurpees), and I certainly did that recently when I paired some of the oysters with a wild trout from the stream near the house.

And now, as we leave May behind us, on this Memorial Day when we remember Americans who lost their lives in conflict, such as the 58,000 dead and missing whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., I invite us to also remember the one million Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodians our misguided war killed, or the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in our repeat mistake in Iraq. They merit our thoughts and attention, as well - and we as a nation will be better for it.