Some of my best memories go back to the warm spring days I spent with my mother in the woods. The youngest of three children, I loved those grand expeditions as we headed out the backdoor into a leafy stand of poplar, beech, and oak. Late April and early May meant leaving our quiet house in midmornings carrying sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, my jeans patched, my “Red Ball Jets” double-knotted, and a battered canteen of cold water over my shoulder.

My mother loved the woods and wanted me to love them too, but at that time of year, it was more than lessons in appreciation for nature or a bit of exercise she had in mind — we were there to hunt mushrooms. The sun on my arms, the fresh air, the brilliant color of redbud and dogwood blooms, the rich aromas of last year’s leaves, and the new spring’s soil were mere bonuses.

For someone so keen on finding mushrooms, even now, I have never acquired a taste for them. Whether they be the black morels that appear first in the month-long season or the “goosenecks” that come along after, the highly-prized white and yellow morels that spring up next, or the smaller “tulips” that hide as the Dutchman’s Breeches and wood anemones take over the forest floor, I have always found my joy from the finding rather than the eating.

In those days, I usually found the firmer gray-blacks along one particular wash, the fiddlehead ferns there a foot tall by the time I scrabbled along its banks. Every second or third year we found big yellow morels, bread sacks of them, as they poked up through the leaf litter below a carpet of Mayapples in a flatland that tumbled toward rich farm fields. 

But, most of all, I remember the tiny and often sunburned tulip morels that I pinched off at the ground by the dozens in a scrubby meadow that stretched out for an acre or more near my family’s small peach and apple orchard. It was there that I was first left to search alone. 

Now, it’s my grandsons who hunt with me, and not unlike my childhood days, we walk out the backdoor of our house into a woodland, this one of black cherry, sugar maple, and sycamore. It is a place for adventures, one of steep hills and deep ravines, with a shallow pond and reedy marsh teeming with skunk cabbage, horsetails, and dragonflies. 

I use a walking stick now, useful for pointing and turning leaves and making paths through stands of blackberry and wild rose thorns. To be sure, we find mushrooms, and over these past few springs — as they’ve grown taller and I’ve grown slower — we’ve found even more. Not just the wild ginger near the clearing where the old power line ran, the box turtles living in the glade near the abandoned railroad bed, or the warblers and robins that scatter in our chattering wake.

We have grown closer as we walk the woods, and hopefully, they will remember the green spring days of their childhoods as I have remembered mine.

Mike Lunsford is a freelance columnist, feature writer, and photographer, primarily for the Terre Haute Tribune-Star and Terre Haute Living magazine. The author of seven books lives in Parke County with his wife, Joanie. Contact Lunsford at hickory913@gmail.com.