Whose Woods These Are
Without photos, videos, or even a voice memo, how do my Amish neighbors remember their lost loved ones? Visitations to graves are even discouraged, and the small, plain sites are certainly not decorated for Memorial Day. This year, walking the timber and the scraggly trail along the creek, hunting for morels with my neighbor Max’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I began to see how commemoration takes place in Buggyland.
In this neighborhood, I am one of the few people with a car, so if you don’t find morels in the woods near you, you don’t find morels. The Amish know the spots and I have the transportation. So, when the spring rains begin, I go morel hunting with one Amish family or another stuffed into my car.
“That’s too many people,” I often protest. “I could get arrested.”
“Oh, we can squeeze together,” is the common reply.
I hadn’t seen Max’s family much throughout the winter. We’d attended the auction where they’d sold all of Max and Flora’s possessions, then touched base again during the January blizzard. Then suddenly, it was spring, the leaves seemingly painted on the trees in a single day.
“Do you have a mushrooming spot?” I asked Eli.
“No, where did you used to go with Grandpa?”
I drove several miles over the gravel road through Millerville, a newish Amish settlement, so called because everyone there is named “Miller.” I found Max’s old farmstead where we used to find morels, but the ownership had clearly changed. The timber was cut. A surveillance camera hung from the barn and two pit bull dogs were not enthused to see me.
So, that evening we were off to the conservation park, Eli, Naomi, and their two sons in straw hats spilling out into the woods, scrambling along, searching for morels.
“Did you used to hunt here with Grandpa?”
“No, but I’m guessing this will be good. I ran into a couple of morel hunters last year coming out of here with a whole bag full of morels. Plenty of dead elms on the ground. It rained last night and today the sun came out. Look, there are mayapples.”
“Do we search for morels near them?”
I nodded. “We’re on a southern slope. Perfect.”
Suddenly, I realized that I was more than the driver for this group. I was the teacher and guide.
“Did you ever go mushrooming with your grandpa?” I asked Eli.
“Maybe just once when I was little.”
How many times had Max and I set out on the hunt? I’d learned that when he said we should I go, we went––no matter what I was doing. Often, he’d find me outside engaged in some chore.
Once, head down, I was pushing the lawn mower across the grass lost in the noise of the engine and clatter of my own thoughts, intent on getting the job done, clipping and tidying up my yard. Suddenly, I looked up and saw a horse and buggy tied to my fence. Max, the grossdaddy from the down the road, a man of at least eighty years old, was climbing up and over the cattle panel.
“Would it suit now? The sun just came out after that nice rain.”
I grinned up at him. “Let’s go.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were stepping out of my car at Max’s old home place and into wildness, the two of us ducking under brambles and climbing over dead trees. Max knew every dip to the land, every oak that had been hit by lightning, every elm that had fallen to disease. In the old days, when his mother called all her 12 children to dinner, Max would often be beyond the reach of her voice here in the woods where the mayapples were now ankle-high.
“Those mayapples are a sure sign,” I told Eli and his family in the conservation park.
We walked gingerly along. We weren’t finding the morels like I thought we would, but that was all a part of the hunt. Maybe we were too close to the parking lot. I thought we should move on to one of the less frequently traveled side trails.
“If Max were here, he would say, ‘There should be some right up here,’ then he’d reach down at his feet and pluck a morel off the ground. ‘And where there’s one, there’s usually another hiding.’ He would scan the area and usually drop 8 or 10 additional morels into his mesh bag.”
Instead of mushrooms, we were finding lots of walnuts on the ground. Max loved to gather up the nuts, too. He had made an ingenious nutcracker out of wood that was a match for the tough walnut shells. Max spent hours cracking the nuts, then picking out the meat, pouring them into plastic bags and selling them at the little Amish store.
“I loved Max’s nutcracker,” I said. “What happened to it?
“It was sold at the auction,” Naomi said.
“Who bought it?”
“I don’t remember. Do you, Eli?”
Eli shrugged his shoulders. “No.”
The boys dashed off ahead of me, and Eli, and Naomi scampered after them. I took a slower pace. And that was the moment when my eyes began to adjust, just like Max had taught me. My sight moved away from the tidy and the clipped to the chaos of the forest floor. The lens of my vision focused smaller and smaller until the minute became large and my consciousness of the moment even larger. The single dead leaf became important—its shape, its size, its color—distinguished from a twig, a piece of scat, the prized conical shape of the morel pushing out of the ground. I sauntered along, only the sound of birds, the sharp, beckoning whistle of the cardinal filling the air.
Still no morels, but the woods were lovely, dark, and deep. More mayapples with their umbrella of droopy leaves. A patch of bluebells, their blossoms tinkling away from their stems, pulling me further up the slope. Then my eye caught three prairie trillium flowers just about to burst open, their maroon-colored flowers pushing up, trying to unfurl from their leaves. A collage of memories rushed over me, not only of Max, but of the moments when I’d learned to identify these wildflowers, of other locations and other springs when I’d rambled through these displays of color. And of course, today, I was so focused on hunting morels, I almost missed the flowers.
I stopped and stood in this woodland garden, capturing the image in my mind. No photos nor videos, no phone, no chatter with anyone else. At Amish funerals, no obituaries are posted to funeral home websites with a “click here” button for the florist. No flowers adorn the casket. The Old Order Amish are truly “Plain People.” Memorials are designed to freeze time. I knew that like Max, the flowers and morels, and all of us in the woods that day, would ultimately disappear and the cycle of nature would move on.
And how odd, I thought. Max’s knowledge of morels had passed to me, an English woman. In turn, I was passing it back to two more generations of Max’s own family. Up ahead, I could see the boys had mushrooms in their bags. They’d found some! I caught up with them. We all pushed on to the very edge of the woods where we met the cornfield. There, we poked our heads out into the light and tried to ignore the voice––distant and urgent––calling us home.
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Oh, what memories you’ve conjured up for me! My parents and 11 siblings spent many a Sunday afternoon plying the hills and ravines among the bluffs by Princeton, Iowa, each spring. We used the buddy system so not to lose one of us. Sometimes the system even worked! Oh, the stories I could tell of our treasured, much-anticipated forays into the “forest.” Stories of cow pies, timber rattlers, muddy creek beds, stiles and lost siblings!
The poignant beauty and wisdom of this piece touch me to my core. I have spring pilgrimages to trout lilies, columbine and trillium. Sometimes I find what I'm seeking, sometimes I am taken by surprise. My mother-in-law was wise in the ways of morels. I love that you are teaching the wisdom and ways of your friend to his grandchildren. What a beautiful lineage, so full of amazing grace.