A good dying deed.
If you’re a dying tree you might as well feed a mushroom. This one looks like it’s already fed some woodpeckers – and probably a bunch of insects, too. I came across this life and death scene crunching along an especially fallish stretch of trail and thought of my friend’s new golden doodle puppies all lined up by mom, nudging and shoving each other, nursing voraciously.
“Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves Our kind multiplies We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door."
Sylvia Plath
A mushroom is the smallest portion of the fungal body, just doing its job of getting the next generation of fungi into the world. The rest is underground - and may already cover the entire forest.
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