Some words on mushrooms and death

When I was five years old, my mom got a camp nurse job and my whole family stayed in a cabin at Camp Jewel, a summer camp in Connecticut. The first day we were there, I went out into our vast back yard, our woods, and spotted a large beige mass growing at the foot of a tree. I yelled to my dad “what is that?!” He said it was a mushroom. I took a second to register that I had eaten mushrooms and that thing growing on the side of a tree didn’t look anything like what I had ever eaten. I was fascinated that something so familiar to me could also take the form of something so unfamiliar. My dad said “you know there are many different kinds of mushrooms. Do you want to look for more?” I gasped. You mean there are more? I looked down, around the landscape of fallen maple and oak leaves and pine needles and moss and did indeed spot another mushroom. I found a tiny colony of white tipped mushrooms about the size of my pinkie at the time. I found a giant orange shelf mushroom jutting out like a secret step to the gods. I found a greenish brown stubby solitary one I called “Troll”. I found ones with spots, ones with deep deep gills that reminded me of miniature filing folders, ones that looked like a pile of petrified mud, ones that looked tall and skinny like wands that I imagined fairies lived amongst, ones that looked lonely and forgotten, blackened, trod upon, in pain. I loved my new little friends. They seemed to want my attention. They seemed to all have personalities, spirits, almost. I came back to my dad proudly having counted 36 different kinds of mushrooms. He was impressed. He said maybe one day I’ll grow up to be a mycologist, a scientist who studies mushrooms. So, at five years old, I had decided I wanted to be a mycologist. Whenever I hear the word mycologist now, I smile to myself and kind of wish I had actually become one. Now, decades later, I sometimes feel just as lost and lonely as some of those mushrooms I had found. One day when I am maybe 85 or so, I will go back to that forest, lay down on those leaves, and let those mushrooms consume me.