Tuesday, September 07, 2021

Fun, Gus?

      Tamara and I have been taking morning constitutionals through our neighborhood.  The sights are many and wondrous -- the majority of our neighbors have front gardens filled with plants and flowers.  A few remarkable for the amount and variety they have growing.  There's art to be found, and fountains.  Wonderful old (and new) architecture, a Little Free Library or two, a "Take one or leave one" table of plants and vegetables and even a Dog Toy Lending Library at sidewalk level, consisting of a basket filled with tennis balls and other dog-friendly playthings.

      Lately, a pair of absolutely improbable toadstools have appeared in two different front lawns.  Like something out of fairy tale.  Our neighborhood had always had the usual assortment of striped toadstools that grow in little "villages," clusters of ground-growing fan fungus that looks like (but almost certainly is not) oyster mushrooms and so on, but these are singular: pallid white, a little shaggy, they stand arrow-straight, nearly a foot tall with a domed cap perhaps four of five inches across.   They look more like a decoration than a real toadstool. One had vanished by the next day; the other has been slowly flattening the cap like an unfurling umbrella.  They might be False Death Cap mushrooms (non-poisonous but bad-tasting, and who wants to risk it?) or the ominous-but-accurately named Destroying Angel death cap.

      I'll add a photo or two as time permits.

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