I dont know why, but lately I've been thinking so much about mushrooms... Of course maybe it isnt really so strange. I often tend to think about specific things that in the moment makes no sense at all. Very often, when I try to figure out what I want to eat and what I should buy; I think of lemon soufflé, it's strange because I dont even like it. The lemon soufflé comes up in my headwork all the time. I dont know when it started, but if I did, I'd probably know why I think of it so much.
I've always had a strange interest in mushrooms. When I were little I used to study mushroom books and try to learn all the names. I was this kind of child that hated school, but loved to study when I were home. Homework wasn't a part of my interest in studying however. I only did homework when my parents told me to do it. When they told me I used to moan and think about all the important things I had to put aside for the useless information that I felt homework brought about.
I used to pick mushrooms in the garden. I took them inside and tried to figure out which ones were poisonous and which ones were eatable. I was a good student with a strict sense in my own personally created classes and I didn't want to cheat by looking in the mushroom books. I thought it was better to trust my instincts and just take a bite out of eatch and every one of them and then figure out which ones were healthy and which ones were not. I felt a little bite would'nt hurt. I had also picked the red one with white spots. It was my favorite, generally because it sported my favorite colour and had a funny look with the white circles. It was the one that had a big black shiny fly sitting on it, that clung to the red and white hat of the mushroom like it was it's own. It was the one I was sure of was unhealthy, because my parents had always warned me about it. "One bite and your dead" -they said.
I thought to myself, it would be out in order if I didn't bite that one too, because it was just something about my choices that said "when you decide to do one thing, you have to go all the way". -"Taste everything, or taste nothing" my naive child mind thought to itself and I were the kind of child that usually always did what I wanted to do, unless I was caught. My moral was; "The things that no one knows of, isn't bad" In my idea things were usually just bad or dangerous when some adult came over it. I had that moral for many many years and to be honest; I had quite fun with it...
However, my internal organs didn't get
to have fun with the mushrooms that day, or any other day. I guess somehow, I had an angel watching over me, because something always came up just before the soft strange smelling things entered my mouth. Today I'm glad I dont see the importance in collecting oddities from the garden, to later use as food. It's a part of my life that isn't so delicate to look back onto. Later on I will probably write more about this hobby I used to care so much about.
Talking about eating strange things from the garden. I just read an interesting article in a Norwegian magazine called Illustrated Science (often I read every single article in it). It were about how some beetles that enter the bee nests to eat the tiny caterpillars, sometimes get caught and put in a jail cell inside the bee houses. The bees do this because they cannot wrestle many of the beetles and instead they shut them up in a room and have a worker bee to stand guard. The beetle will eventually starve to death inside the cell, but apparently they can survive for months. The interesting thing about this, that shows that the small crawlers on the ground have their own sad and crazy world to struggle in, has to do with the way the beetle manage to stay alive for so long. It simply uses it's antennas to tickle the guard until the guard vomits some honey. The beetle will then eat the vomit and stay alive for a long time to enjoy in the jail cell.
I searched the image archives at google to find a picture of the beetle tickle, but I only came up with this. It has nothing to do with this entry, but I liked it enough to link to it here. I did find some news on the beetle front thought (often I did eat bugs, but I hope I never ate one of those hive beetles when I little, I hope they have never lived here in Scandinavia).
