BY STEVE SEMKEN
The morel season starts with a thought one morning, the vision of a morelin my dreams, worthy of checking out, so I venture to my earliest morel spot.There’s nothing, yet the greenish, green, soft, and vivid mosses tellme otherwise—something will soon happen. Two days later I venture withmy five-year-old to look and soon we’re on our hands and knees, crawling,gawking at the smallest morels this side of invisible. “Ahhhh-ha, here’sone,” I exclaim. I hear her laughing, “Dad, here, here, here!” Themystery has begun. We find them slowly at first, then we get a bagful, andanother. The season is mixed with rain, then cold; warm, then infrequent rain;cold again, then a late freeze. But with luck we will be fortunate to againenjoy the local morels. I sometimes think it would be nice to know more aboutthem, but I stop short of this. To know more, as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet, “wouldpluck out the heart of my mystery.