cendawan busut
I was reading a chapter in Diana Gabaldon’s A Breath of Snow and Ashes about woodear mushrooms and I remember that I haven’t go picking them les champignons for a very long time.
On a particular small patch of clearing at the back of our house sometimes cendawan busut would grow now and then. The land clearing itself is not filled with greenery, but rather arid and it is quite weird if you compare the surrounding that is flush with greenery and bushes from which you could extract a good deal of species of animals and flora. I used to think the scarcity of creature on that clearing must be because of the ants or termites that is living underground, that it deprives the necessary nutrients for other vegetation to grow. In contrast, the animals are providing favorable conditions for that particular mushroom. The presence of ants and/or termites must have caused the soil to become something really close to an enrichment culture for that kind of fungus, just to borrow some logics from microbiology.
I remember once that my second sister that now I haven’t seen for close to four years says one day that there’s cendawan busut growing and we might as well pluck them off the ground for lunch. It just rained a couple hours before and now it’s quite sunny outside and I take it that such conditions are necessary for the growth of les champignons. I don’t remember how many of us got involved in the activity because I’d think that I was scarcely 5 or 6, since there is also the possibility of the girl next door and her sister might join us in as partners in crime. We always cook those mushroom in a lot of water, but then again I don’t remember if we eat it fried or anything other than in sayur bening, albeit they’re not a class of sayur in itself I guess.
The memory of the mushrooms is so connected with the ambiance and I should say the color of it all. I remember not really the plucking but more of the weird smell in the air near the clearing, the flat and ‘brownish’ smell of dry soil, the feelings that you have when it’s between 1 to 3 in the afternoon, sunny day outside and it has showered a little early in the morning. The color? Yellow and cyan. Yellow might be because of the reflection of the sun off the moisture from the vegetation leaves around, cyan? I have no idea really.
Of course I need only once for anybody to show me to do anything involving gathering natural resources and from then on I always go back to the clearing when the conditions are met: brief rain in the morning, and sunny weather between 1 to 3pm. The mushrooms keep growing, always the same ones, and that is what always fascinates me, until once I remember they grow no more, even though I keep coming now and then, and before long grass and all kinds of vegetation starts to invade and colonize the clearing and that put a stop to my hunting of les champignons. perhaps the ant and/or termite colony has been decolonized.
Then in one of those cheap drama swasta I watch how a kid brought back a basket of weird looking mushrooms, different from the ones I mentioned before, and got the whole family dead for eating the fungus. I guess that’s another reason that why I have stop completely go mushroom hunting altogether, other than having grown out of it ha ha.
On a particular small patch of clearing at the back of our house sometimes cendawan busut would grow now and then. The land clearing itself is not filled with greenery, but rather arid and it is quite weird if you compare the surrounding that is flush with greenery and bushes from which you could extract a good deal of species of animals and flora. I used to think the scarcity of creature on that clearing must be because of the ants or termites that is living underground, that it deprives the necessary nutrients for other vegetation to grow. In contrast, the animals are providing favorable conditions for that particular mushroom. The presence of ants and/or termites must have caused the soil to become something really close to an enrichment culture for that kind of fungus, just to borrow some logics from microbiology.
I remember once that my second sister that now I haven’t seen for close to four years says one day that there’s cendawan busut growing and we might as well pluck them off the ground for lunch. It just rained a couple hours before and now it’s quite sunny outside and I take it that such conditions are necessary for the growth of les champignons. I don’t remember how many of us got involved in the activity because I’d think that I was scarcely 5 or 6, since there is also the possibility of the girl next door and her sister might join us in as partners in crime. We always cook those mushroom in a lot of water, but then again I don’t remember if we eat it fried or anything other than in sayur bening, albeit they’re not a class of sayur in itself I guess.
The memory of the mushrooms is so connected with the ambiance and I should say the color of it all. I remember not really the plucking but more of the weird smell in the air near the clearing, the flat and ‘brownish’ smell of dry soil, the feelings that you have when it’s between 1 to 3 in the afternoon, sunny day outside and it has showered a little early in the morning. The color? Yellow and cyan. Yellow might be because of the reflection of the sun off the moisture from the vegetation leaves around, cyan? I have no idea really.
Of course I need only once for anybody to show me to do anything involving gathering natural resources and from then on I always go back to the clearing when the conditions are met: brief rain in the morning, and sunny weather between 1 to 3pm. The mushrooms keep growing, always the same ones, and that is what always fascinates me, until once I remember they grow no more, even though I keep coming now and then, and before long grass and all kinds of vegetation starts to invade and colonize the clearing and that put a stop to my hunting of les champignons. perhaps the ant and/or termite colony has been decolonized.
Then in one of those cheap drama swasta I watch how a kid brought back a basket of weird looking mushrooms, different from the ones I mentioned before, and got the whole family dead for eating the fungus. I guess that’s another reason that why I have stop completely go mushroom hunting altogether, other than having grown out of it ha ha.
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