Quite the haul of chanterelles!
Starting today, I will be sharing a series of seasonal notebooks, four a year, each lasting a calendar month and following a single theme. The first notebook is Leaves of Poetry.
Today has been a comedy of errors. And the rain has truly set in. Sunny walks in the woods earlier this week are already a distant memory.
Today, we had one of those lazy family walks which turned into a two-hour ramble. Auri kept saying, “I’m having too much fun!” and Elfi kept laughing and chattering away. The promised showers hadn’t really come to anything, and it was still, warm and calm. We are in peak mushroom season right now, with several varieties popping up in different parts of the woods. Auri knows not to touch any, as I’m not confident enough in my identification, but keeps reminding me that our friend Daša knows which ones we can collect and eat so she’ll be doing that with her one of these days.
And it’s all change for August! A beautiful day, and a walk filled with pale, dappled sunshine in The Pinewood. Elfi has now started nursery, Auri has two weeks left before starting school, and I’m officially on annual leave rather than maternity leave now.
And… breathe.
A rainy, rainy walk today, though so much greenness! July bowing out true to her form this year, on both accounts.
The recent rain (three afternoons of thunderstorms, two accompanied by deluges, breaking the heat) has turned the first of the paths through the woods into a broom jungle, the sheer weight of all the water pushing down the whips and closing off the way forward. We picked our way through yesterday, and pruned a few lost branches today.
Auri loves the broom. Whenever we go for a walk, she presents Elfi and me with handfuls of the petals.
On Sunday, Auri wanted to borrow my phone to take photos on her walk with Euan and Scapa.
It’s that time of year already, where the woods are all mushrooms and larch needles.
