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Snapshots from Home

The puffballs are migrating. The giant puffball mushrooms UD‘s forest/meadow produces every autumn have begun breaking through the soil (just like the first photo of this sequence), but this year they’re appearing much closer to her house — four of them, so far, in a line along a little path she cleared between the pachysandra and the woods’ edge. There are another five somewhat hidden in the woods.

UD wants to photograph all of this and put it on her blog, and in fact she’s about to have brunch with her neighbor and photographer, Tamara Trocki, in order to get some picture-taking training. She was disappointed not to get a photograph of the big beautiful spider web suspended from her dogwood tree last Sunday morning. It had rained the night before, and the water drops and the sun brought out every filament. But by the time UD began thinking about taking a picture, the web had collapsed. (It looked more or less like this.)

As the puffballs grow (this is a matter for anxiety too, since the squirrels and who knows what else scratch and eat away at the mushrooms as they enlarge) – and they get enormous (this is some of last year’s crop) – I’d like to keep taking pictures, to chronicle the grotesque size and shape of these things over the next couple of weeks.

When they reach full size they do what they’ve been waiting to do – blow their top and disperse their spore cloud through the universe. Smashing ripe puffballs is a fine old American pastime.

Margaret Soltan, October 7, 2012 8:23AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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