50 years of marriage

On November 28th, 1963 my parents were married in Galilee, Pennsylvania.  On November 30th, 2013, people gathered in Mount Gretna, PA to celebrate 50 years of that marriage.

The Timbers

They had rented a hall at the Timbers, a nearby restaurant and dinner theater, and about 90 friends and family came together on a cold and cloudy Saturday afternoon to eat and drink and talk.  A buffet steamed.  A slideshow scrolled through the photos and snapshots of a life together.  Their favorite music played in the background.

My sisters had ganged up on me, so when the last of those to get to the buffet were well into their meals, I stood up to say some words about love over the long haul and what I had learned from my parents and their marriage.  And we toasted them heartily with cider and champagne.

Evelyn and Bea

My mother, Bea, stood up to say a few words of thanks - and to make sure that people didn't let our talking keep them from eating or getting seconds.  She also deflected some of the attention to other couples in the hall whose 50th wedding anniversaries had come and gone.

My father, Dick, stood to speak.  To general laughter, he told how the night before he'd been desperately spinning out contingency plans for feeding 90 people, because the Timbers was surrounded by a dozen fire trucks from all around the county.  (The chimney had caught fire, though no real harm was done except to my parents' peace of mind.)

When he'd finished, I stood again to encourage people to write their thoughts or stories or wishes in the leather-bound book by the door - but also to encourage them to feel free to stand up and say a few words.

Grandchildren

And Eric, my brother-in-law, who I'd enlisted as a ringer, rose and spoke of his admiration for this family, and he got a good laugh with a mischievous quotation of Montaigne's about how the perfect marriage required a deaf husband and blind wife.

Then something important happened.  Pennsylvanians can be very shy about toasts and public speechifying, and I had expected that few, if any, would speak up so publicly.  But one after another, people stood up and spoke - telling a story or sharing their feelings about the couple.

One of his cousins told of how my father was a pioneer and a role model for his set - one of the first to leave the valley and go off to college.  Another told of how their teacher, Mrs. Cogan, used his departure to tell them all about what college was and what it meant.  It was the first he'd every really heard of this idea of leaving the farms and going to university.

Locals stood up to talk about both Mom and Dad as pillars of that community - involved in politics and environmental conservation and charity work.  A former colleague of my father's from down in Lancaster county recalled the respect that Dad had had for the students he taught and what that meant as an inspiration.  People recounted their generosity and openness, or told funny stories of mishaps and misunderstandings.

Christine and Elaine

People who knew them in one setting got to hear how they have existed in these other settings and touched other people in other ways, and I think they were fascinated to hear of it - to see the horizons of these lives extended beyond the part that they had already known and admired.

The dessert was nearly done when the last person had spoken, and we all began to rise and mill about in the smaller-scale visiting of conversation and leave-taking.  Nico said to me that the little speeches were by far his favorite part of the day.

Bea and Dick

Much to be thankful for

preparing the meal

Porter carves the turkey

a feast of thanksgiving

What Humans are Capable of

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the great museums of the world.  What is astounding about the place is not only the expanse of its "encyclopedic"collection, but the quality of the objects there.  You really are walking among the masterworks of the species.

Last weekend I spent three days as an ethnographer at the Museum.  This entailed wandering the museum observing people and striking up conversations with them about their experience of the museum.  It's all part of a larger project by the Met's to understand their visitors better.

The first day I spoke to about 30 people in conversations that ran from 3 minutes to 40.  At the beginning you are gathering the "top of mind" stuff - the stuff that is easy for people to articulate - for example, how they learn so much about history and other cultures or how inspiring they find the beautiful things in this beautiful place, or how we can't understand ourselves without understanding these roots and these capacities on display here.  How the place is a refuge.

By the second day, you've heard that, and you are paying attention to the moments when their articulateness breaks down, or where the eyes widen slightly and the hand gestures intensify.  You are on the hunt for the deeper moments that bind people to this place.  When a person got so absorbed in an object's craftsmanship - in the hours and days of labor and attention that must have gone into it - that they passed through that object to a connection to a real person who lived in another time and place.  Or when a person viscerally felt that they were not looking at a carving in a museum, but standing in ancient Egypt, seeing the chiselers hand, and hearing the flakes fly.  When they felt themselves torn from their normal now-ness and pinned down as just another pinpoint in the human panoply.  Or when a person driven to the breaking point by the mundane injustices of daily living came away from the Museum cleansed and re-calibrated with their sanity preserved.

On the third day, you continue with this, another 30 or so conversations, but also observing the visitors - watching to see what hints there are of the experiences and discombobulations that people confide.  It's fascinating, tiring work, and my little notebook was filled with jottings by the end.  

Now the challenge is to make sense of it all.  Or enough of it, at least.

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The other day, I had to make a long trip in the car with my 11-year old son, Nico.  The radio was broken, and for 3 hours we sang in the car.  (He knows about ten times more songs that I do.)  I taught him most of Poe's Raven, and Jabberwocky and he told me jokes.

Then in the course of the weekend, a mechanic inadvertently fixed the radio (whose wires had been fried when I'd had the starter replaced in the spring).  On the return trip, we sang a bit, and chatted, but mostly listened to the radio - with its recurrent barrages of yammering commercials.

If I'm thinking the glass is half empty, I can lament how easy it is to let opportunities to live more richly slip away every time we fall for the lazy conveniences of our consumer culture.  If I'm thinking the glass is half full, I can marvel at the resources that exist in every kid's brain just waiting to be needed and valued.

Mostly I follow the old physicist's observation that the glass is always full.  It is what it is.  Enjoy the music.

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Hiking as Church

walking the Coogan Farm

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I've slowly come to realize that for me the most important spiritual practice of all is to walk in nature. 

I can live fine without congregations and rituals and deep spiritual contemplations, but if I don't take myself away from the clangor of humans and their internal combustion engines - I wither spiritually. 

After our banquet of California hiking this summer, I resolved to let no week pass without getting out into the woods, and I've been mostly successful at it.

On Tuesday I tagged along with the Nature Center staff.  They were learning the new trails being blazed on a 45-acre tract of land they had acquired (at great effort and expense) to expand the Center's reach nearly all the way to the Mystic river.  

Stillman mansion

It's hardly pristine wilderness, and the land bears plenty of evidence of 370 years of use by the Europeans, (and less evidence of the thousands of years Native Americans lived along the river and its estuary).

Today much of it is forest - though there was no forest here during most of Mystic's heyday of sea-faring and ship-building.  More recent pastures and orchards are being reclaimed by shrubs and vines and young trees.  

Some of the encroaching vegetation are natives like greenbriar, winterberry, blackberry, and sweet pepperbush.  Other invaders, like autumn olive, phragmites, asian bittersweet and honeysuckle, have hitchhiked with us from other countries and continents.

greenbriar berries are winter forage for the birds

There are quarries and stone walls, old wells and foundations, and even the brick and stone cellar of a 49-room mansion that was never finished - only ever roofed by ash and willow boughs.

We stripped an apple tree of all the tart-sweet fruit we could reach - like the ranging troop of primates we were.

The whole place is a rich and far-reaching conversation between humans and nature.  

And that is nourishing food for the mind and soul.

pokeweed, burned by frost

The Cold of November

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The basil and pepper plants were already done in by earlier frosts, but a hard freeze tonight will probably do for the rest.  I pulled the parsley, and cut some white sage and mint for drying.  I considered taking some oregano, but we rarely use it, and it seems to bear the cold just fine if I want to steal a winter leaf or two.  This year we planted rosemary and thyme in a pot.  I brought it in and set it before one of the windows.

There was a row of potatoes that I'd never dug, so I harvested those last few pounds.  The stalks had died back in July, so not only were the potatoes mostly smallish, but I had to guess at where the row was.  That meant the more than usual fell victim to the spade.  I won't have to worry about the potatoes lasting the whole winter this year.  We'll eat them up by New Years.

As the temperature dropped today the bees finally stopped flying.  I fitted in mouse guards at the lower entrances of each hive to make sure that none invade as the bees form their clusters.  I've also realized that only one of the hives has an upper exit.  If the warm, damp air that rises from the bees can't escape, it hits the cold cover, condenses and can rain cold water back down upon bees.  So next week on the warmest day I'll have to remove the inner covers and cut a 3/4 inch slot in each.  

I feel like I'm finally battening down the hatches for winter's approach.

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The Warmth of November

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In a few days, it will drop down to the mid 20's here, but today the breeze is warm the the door is open.  We've already had a few hard frosts, but still, a lone dragonfly patrols the yard, and frogs are still on the move.  The compost heap is busily being converted directly into fruit flies.  

Most of the brown-eyed Susans wither by the end of summer, but there's a strain in our herb garden that puts out late blooms every year, even against the hard frosts. 

A couple of weeks ago, a woman who blogs in Rhode Island was sad to see a handful of swallowtail caterpillars in among her carrots, because they were too small to pupate and the first hard freeze was closing in.  Whatever butterfly had laid in this brood had done it too late to outrun the season.

I was more intrigued than saddened, however.  One of the remarkable things about evolution and adaptation is the way they usually rely on "mistakes" like these.  In New England, Black Swallowtails raise two broods.  The first pupate in a bright green chrysalis and grow to adulthood in the summer.  The larvae of the second brood each form a brown chrysalis (to camouflage with the winter), and they spend the winter as pupae, to emerge in the spring as butterflies.

In the southern US, Black Swallowtails raise three broods, only the last of which overwinters.  As climate change makes the Rhode Island winters more and more like the winters of Virginia, these butterflies, who seem to brood so foolishly and futilely late, will turn out to be the pioneers that exploit a new November.  As long as mistakes like this are being made, there will be individuals to thrive in new conditions and new environments - even changes that race forward as quickly climate breakdown is going to.

It's a lesson humans might do well to learn.  Every time we choose efficiency, optimization,  and an insistence on a single path, instead of diversity and dissensus, we drain a little bit of resilience and adaptability out of our systems.  Resilient systems - and Life is nothing if not a resilient system - are ones that have generous room for mistakes and failures and hopeless experiments.

UPDATE:  And because the food system is a prime example of a system we've made less and less resilient, here's a nice example of what I'm talking about over at Grist: Why more biodiversity means more food security.

Someone wasted no time raiding the undefended hornets nest.

Universe Man

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Nico decided to be the Universe for Halloween.

So, the night before, he and his friend Anya are painting comets and galaxies and nebulae all over an old jacket of mine.

Universe man.

Brooklyn Sojourn

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Monica and I have both been under-employed and money, as they say, has been tight.  But life has to be lived and so last Friday we headed into New York on the train.  Nico mostly idled the trip away on a little game player, Monica dozed and thumbed through National Geographic.  I read through Scientific American and stared out the window as autumnal, coastal Connecticut clicked and rattled by.

At 6 on a Friday evening Grand Central Station was an anthill that'd been poked with a stick, and the subway was over-heated and dense with commuters.  Nico wilted and went pale.

But in Brooklyn old friends waited, and our Poet, Denver, was preparing dinner -- soft red beans and noodles upon kale. And the Actress, Rhonda who's been swallowed by the PTA, together with the Girl, who's eight, set the table while we chatted, and made room for fresh bread torn into chunks and a platter of tomatoes, herbs and fresh mozzarella.  When the beans were ready we gathered at the table, made the Girl and Nico put down their books, and we ate.  And when it was down to crumbs and we refilled our wine and ale and water we told jokes and riddles and funny stories - on and on. Nico was on a roll,

from the idiotic . . .

Knock, knock
Who's th-
Mooo!  Interrupting Cow! 

to the cruel . . .

Where do you find a dog with no legs?
Right where you left it.

to the obscure . . . 

What does the 'B' in Benoit B. Mandlebrot stand for?
Benoit B. Mandlebrot.

It's one of the things people did before the entertainment industry colonized the home, and it felt good to laugh and strain our brains.  But eventually we'd exhausted our collective supply of jokes and riddles and so the Girl and Nico returned to their books.   (Occasionally, I would hear them quietly harmonizing some pop song together, each of them with their nose in their book.)  The rest of us talked into the night of family and politics and art and people and ideas.  And I switched from ale to water and eventually to sleep.

I woke early, but Denver had woken even earlier and fetched bread.  There was steel-cut oatmeal on the stove and smooth, black coffee.  After breakfast, he and Monica and I walked the two miles from Carroll Gardens to Prospect Park - along the streets of brownstones, and across the opalescent green scar of the Gowanus Canal by the South Brooklyn Casket factory.  The Park Slope brownstones were decorated for Halloween and little children in helmets rode on zippy three-wheeled scooters.  At the farmer's market he talked with his favorite farmers and bought duck eggs, obscure radishes, greens and apples.  We carried chocolate croissants home.

Later, I was in the park with Nico and the Girl.  A troop of brown-skinned boys ranging from about 8 to 13 were doing parkour on a boulder and the remains of a fallen tree - standing back flips, runs and twisting jumps.  They were free-range (no parents), charismatic and two were richly foul-mouthed.  The Girl and Nico sat rapt, partly in admiration of the skill and partly in fear that they were going to see someone die or break a bone.

More of our visit below the fold . . . .

Obamacare Simply

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I'm always bemused by the polling that purports to gauge how popular these Democratic health reforms are, when pretty much none of the people being polled have the vaguest understanding of what those reforms actually are.

The conservatives have been blasting away with the Right Wing Wurlitzer sowing confusion, fear, and misunderstanding. But the liberal "Nuh Uh!"s haven't exactly clarified things with a clear and straightforward explanation. And I think that is mostly because putting Obama's "signature legislative achievement" in simplified terms doesn't make it sound very grand or heroic:

1. We're going to require everyone to buy an insurance policy. 
2. We're going to require the insurance companies to sell everyone an insurance policy.
3. We're going to chip in some tax dollars for people who can't afford to buy an insurance policy.

It ain't tyranny.  It ain't exactly transformative health care policy either. It is what it is.  And I doubt 5 per cent of the population grasps the basics.

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Honeyguide Bird

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image by Colin Beale

There is a species of bird in Africa called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator), which likes to eat beeswax, the only vertebrate to do so.  It will also eat bees, bee larvae, and wax moths if it can get access to an open hive.  But it's a small bird and beehives are notoriously well-defended, so the species has a unique adaptation.  It knows every hive in a 200 mile radius.  If it finds humans within a few kilometers of a hive it will fly up to them, calling and flitting back and forth, flashing its tail.  If the humans are willing to grab an ax and follow the bird, it will lead them to the colony.  (Some traditional African honey-hunters blow a loud whistle, called a fuulido before they set out in search of honey in order to solicit a honeyguide.)  Once the humans have broken into the hive (usually a hollow tree) the bird can feast on the wax and the grubs.

The behavior is innate rather than learned - an evolved behavior.  By analyzing the difference between subspecies scientists calculate that the behavior is at least 3 million years old.

There are two theories about how it came about.  The first is that it co-evolved with the honey badger, who will use their claws to tear open a hive if they can find one.  But in 30 years of trying scientists have never been able to observe the birds interacting with a badger, so they remain skeptical.  A honeyguide was once observed to solicit baboons, but the baboons weren't interested.

The other theory is put forth by the anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham.  He believes that the behavior evolved with human ancestors.  Wrangham's primary interest is in human evolution, and in particular he believes that the most important innovation which enabled the development of Homo sapiens was the mastery of fire.  He studied chimpanzees and noted that they spend fully half of their waking hours chewing.  He himself tried and failed to subsist on their raw diet.   The ability to cook food frees up nutrients that are otherwise inaccessible and this increase in the amount and quality of nutrients allowed human evolution to take it's unique path -- a shrinking digestive tract and a shrinking jaw, but most importantly that large, extremely energy-intensive brain.  

Cooking food is what enabled our human ancestors to support and feed those ever larger brains, and gave them the time and energy to be human.

But hominid brains have been growing for over two million years and there is no archeological evidence of fire use back that far - so Wrangham isn't able prove that cooking had anything to do with kicking off brain growth.  

This is where the greater honeyguide comes in.  Wrangham observed that chimpanzees love honey, but can't get it.  Humans love honey, and they can get it.  The difference?  Fire.  The use of fire and smoke is universal among honey hunters to confuse the bees and derail their defensive behaviors.  If honeyguide birds have been bringing humans to beehives for three million years, then it stands to reason that humans and their ancestors have probably had fire for the past three million years to help them despoil the hives.

It's not an air-tight case by any means, but I love this story of a magical partnership between a meddlesome wax-eating bird and these honey-loving, torch-wielding hominids - a partnership that has stood the test of a whirlwind millions-years ride from ape to human.

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More Hen of the Woods

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I had to walk farther back into the forest this time, 

but I found another nice Hen-of-the-woods.

When I brought it in to show to Monica,
a little red-backed salamander jumped out.

I put the salamander back outside.

So what should we do with the mushroom?

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Bald-faced Hornets and other Yellowjackets

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wikipedia

This summer, I've noticed the occasional bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) at the compost heap or checking the beehives for weaknesses, but so far the hives all seem robust enough to dissuade any wasps from making real forays.  When I first noticed them, I checked back behind the quince bushes and there was the nest - smaller than a basketball, but bigger than a volleyball.  Every second or third year a colony builds there.  Maybe a young queen is attracted to some invisible sign that a nest has prospered there in the past.

We call them hornets, but they are actually a species of yellowjacket, but twice the size of other yellowjackets and sporting white rather than yellow.  Like their cousins, a single queen hibernates through the winter underground or in a crevice somewhere.  The young hornet queen emerges in the spring and starts making the paper nest and rearing a first generation of sterile workers.  These take over building the nest, foraging, feeding the next generations of larvae, protecting the colony, and so on.

Hornets Nest

At the end of the summer, the queen rears a generation of drones and virgin queens, who will fly forth and mate.  Only these newly mated queens will overwinter.  The rest die off and the nest is abandoned, never to be re-used.

The big, papery globes are a dramatic structure to find in the woods - especially compared to other yellowjacket hives, which never appear as anything but a hole in the ground.  I had assumed the smaller cousins just dug burrows like ants, until a few years ago I had a colony that chose to live under a log right by the front door.  One night I took a can of bug spray, (left by the house's previous owners) intending to tip over the log and spray insecticide down the hole.  But when I turned the log, it came up with a torn, volleyball-sized paper nest.  I was glad I'd approached it at night when the wasps weren't prepared, or the ensuing massacre could have gone the other way.

But generally, unless they build somewhere especially inconvenient I leave the wasps alone.   It's true that they make off with the compost meant for the garden (together with the jays, raccoons and deer), but they otherwise don't bother us.  If they take the occasional caterpillar from the garden, so much the better.  And besides, I think our unpainted outdoor furniture has never become splintery because we have the hornets and other paper wasps who come and strip off the outer layers of wood all summer long.

Yellowjacket Colony

House Painting

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7 years ago we hired a pair of women to paint our house.  By the time they reached the last of the four sides, not only had they underestimated how long the job was going to take, but they couldn't stand working with each other anymore.  So, on the east face, on the last too-hot day, they spread the paint on wood they hadn't prepped properly.  After a year the surface was starting to crack and chip, and after 7 years it was a wreck of peeling paint.

Monica, who hates painting much, much less than I do, took advantage of a bout of underemployment and fine fall weather to scrape and repaint.

Of course, there's nothing like a fresh coat of paint on the walls to show how badly the windows need attention as well . . . 

Hen of the Woods

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Mushroom hunting is a practice best approached with caution, so I've only just added a second species to my foraging.  Number one was the morels that come up among the asparagus.  They are as unmistakable as they are delicious.

(click to embiggen)

The second is hen-of-the-woods, Grifola frondosa, called also the sheep's head or ram's head, known to Italian-Americans as the signorina mushroom, called maitake by the Asians.

I know the frilled clusters can be found in the woods beyond the stone wall.  In fact the only time we see anyone in this part of the woods is during mushroom season.   Since I'd just had a chance to handle examples at the recent mushroom festival, it was time to take a knife and a bag and go out foraging.  Not 50 feet from the property line I found the remains of one, nine-tenths cut away by another hunter.  I left it there to spread its spores.  It didn't take long before I found one of my own, right were it was supposed to be, at the base of a mature oak.  I followed the example of the other gatherer and left a tenth or so there.  On the way back, in the hollow of a dead oak, nearly back to our wall I found another one, smallish and dark, and with a rich, earthy smell.

I washed and tore up the larger one and sautéed it in olive oil with garlic, salt and pepper.  It came out wonderfully, with a delicate flavor, and firm, varied texture.  I served it up with roasted garden potatoes and a beet, apple and onion dish that Monica taught me (which I fondly recalled from Almaty).  With a pint of Murphy's Irish Stout to wash it down.

hen of the woods fer eatin'

Monbiot's Climate Breakdown

When it comes to climate change, I’m not a huge fan of George Monbiot.  He’s too fond of playing the calm, reassuring voice of reason, and tut-tutting at those who are more aggressively sounding the alarms.  But like many scientists before him he has that sinking feeling that no one is responding to the voices of reason, and we’re really just going to stumble our way to catastrophe.

In this essay he bluntly gets to the crux of the matter.  The science of climate change is settled in all but the details.  Also, there’s one crucial and unavoidable path to a solution, and the nations of the world are taking exactly zero steps down that path:

The only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any [UK] minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.

 . . . all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They claim to accept the science and to support the [UN] intergovernmental panel. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe it foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.

 It doesn’t matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.

Obama’s “all of the above” energy plan is the current U.S. version of this suicidal orientation.  He at least has the excuse that US legislatures at every level brim with people more ignorant and misinformed than any in Europe, but still the unanimity of cowardice is damning. 

I've harped on this before, (here, and more indirectly, here) so I'm glad that even an analyst as cautious as Monbiot is finally making it explicit.  If the plan doesn't insist that fossil fuels remain in the ground, then it is not a plan to stop climate breakdown.  Renewable energy, nuclear power,  conservation and efficiency do absolutely nothing in and of themselves to counteract climate change.  They are not the solution -- they are only meant to make the solution possible.

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Autumn Greenbriar

autumn greenbriar

still life with purple sneakers

hay field across the road

Scorched Earth Retreat

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Years ago, when I was traveling in Norwegian Lapland wearing a backpack and my first beard, an old man showed me a souvenir that he preserved from World War II.  It was tin cup that had been punctured by a knife.  When the German occupiers left his village, they had taken what they could and destroyed everything else - including this man's metal cup. 

When I look at the political circus being played out in Washington, D.C. today and for the past two decades, I see older privileged white men in a scorched earth retreat away from a government that had served them well - but which they fear they can no longer own and control.  When I see these Congressmen yammering about defunding health insurance reform, I see a retreating army trying to make sure there's no tin cup left behind that can still hold water.

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For this house in the woods, 

it's the season 

when mice try to move in, 

and the cats enact 

lengthy, 

drawn-out 

executions.

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Wild Mushroom Festival at DPNC

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Every fall, at the end of September the Nature Center in Mystic puts on a Wild Mushroom Festival.  The local mycologists all bring their foraged samples to show off.  They spread them all out upon a long table -- poisonous or edible, from giant frills and volleyball sized puffballs to dainty parasols of orange, white brown or purple -- dozens of varieties of fungus that can be found in the local woods and pastures.  The experts and mushroom stalkers, many of them wearing their best fungus-themed sweatshirts and t-shirts, answer questions and compare notes with one another.

Restaurants bring their hotplates and chafing dishes to serve up samplings of wild mushroom dishes -- risotto,  sauces, canapés, and soups.  One restaurant grilled traditional, flint corn johnnycakes with oily mushrooms dribbled upon them.  Another had concocted a bread pudding.  The Mystic Drawbridge ice cream makers brought ice cream made from candy cap mushrooms that tasted like maple syrup.  

A small band played sets of roots music (mycelium music?) under the eaves of the Nature Center building.  Monica was working in the drink tent, serving out wine, beer, cider and blackcurrant juice.  Nico hates any taste of mushrooms, so he munched on the bread that was meant to be soaked in gravy.  He warned his friends to not be fooled into eating any of that ice cream.

I had him lead me on a hike back through the woods of the nature center.  He knows them better than me from years of Monica working there and going to camp and outings there.

I've always wanted to know my way around the mushrooms better.  Around our house we get our handful of morels in the spring as the asparagus first sends its spears up.  Otherwise, we have stinkhorns, amanita, cups and puffballs, but nothing else edible.  One of the most sought after fungi locally is hen-of-the-woods.  It grows back in the woods beyond the stone wall, but I think savvy locals usually get to it first.  The neighbors have shared some with us in the past, fried up in butter with black pepper.  Maybe I'll go have a look tomorrow, just in case.