Judy P's Tickle Trunk

or Horse Farts.

Pretty Pink Peonies

I wished a while back that I kept a weather diary so that I could look back and tell if this summer had gotten ahead of itself. We had some real nice days in June and my peonies bloomed like never before. Then came a week of wet weather which could only be encouraging to ducks and umbrella manufacturers, and my peonies were battered to limp brown rags. Next came hot dry heat which I would have expected in August around the civic holiday and at the time of writing this post, it showed no sign of abating. The nights were still cool and if one could keep things watered they grew like Jack’s famous beanstalk, and then some. The earlier wet days also brought a proliferation of mushrooms.

I have a particular fascination with mushrooms, both edible and inedible. No, not those ‘magic mushrooms’; the psilocybin  variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms which grow in Newfoundland, affectionately known as ‘shrooms’ and which have sent many an adventure-seeking young person to emerg with paranoia and panic attacks. Just regular old garden variety mushrooms: from ragged mousy brown mushrooms to the fairyland red-capped amanitas with their cute little white polka dots. How can something so cute be so deadly?

In the week of which I write I had been walking up the driveway in Milton when something caught my eye; I looked down and saw a round white ball. It was the correct colour but too small to be a lacrosse ball. It was more the size of a plum. Had it rolled to a stop in our drive after being inadvertently dropped by a kid walking along the road? I reached down to pick it up and found it attached to the ground. It yielded slightly to a squeeze and I suddenly recognized it for what it was: an immature horse fart. “I found a horse fart” I shrieked towards the guys on the patio and my thoughts were transported back to a sunny day in a meadow in Newfoundland, somewhere between Lewisporte and Loon Bay. I would have been five? or six? Why my siblings and I were all running around in the field I don’t know. I recall I was picking buttercups and holding them against my wrist to see if I liked butter – the real game was to hold a buttercup under someone’s chin and if the yellow reflected on their skin you’d shout “Judy (or whatever their name was) likes butter!!”. Even at five I knew that these results were often invalid – it always showed that I liked butter when in fact I only liked Eversweet butter and was completely revolted by Good Luck butter. To tell the truth, neither of them were even real butter. They were different kinds of margarine made in Newfoundland; at this point I don’t think that I had even tasted real butter which my mother called ‘table butter’. I digress, where was I? Right, in the field with buttercups where I heard my brother shout with enthusiasm “Horse farts”. I heard my sisters giggle. I ran towards them  to find them zigzagging about, stomping the grass to give rise to little clouds of brown smoke which drifted off on the breeze. “W’as a horse fart?” I asked. Pete pointed at what looked like a little round brown leathery sac on the ground.  I knelt down and was squinting through my little blue-rimmed glasses at the odd  brown pouch in the grass when Pete’s boot swooped down and stomped the thing. It  exploded like a small grenade and I got a face full of organic brown dust. Blech, I wiped my mouth and nose and asked “Where’s da horses?” and looked anxiously around the field; I was deathly afraid of any animal larger than a bunny rabbit. “there’s no horses, just their farts” Pete explained with a giggle. As I imagined these little round receptacles popping out of horse’s bums, I excitedly took off looking for my own horse fart to stomp. Sadly, I could only find the broken shells of those already detonated by my siblings. I later learned that horse farts are actually old dried up puffball mushrooms (lycoperdon gemmatum).

Unripe Horse Fart

Puffball innards

Now, on this auspicious day I had found my very own premature puffball though when I first plucked it I was not one hundred percent certain. I examined it more closely. It had no stalk and no gills. I sniffed it. Aaah, the smell of a thousand ripe mushrooms concentrated into into one small musty ball. I sliced it open, the knife squeaking as it worked through the rubbery flesh. Did I taste it? Sure, I’m certainly not stunned enough to go that far! No, I did what any modern woman mystified by a mushroom would do; I Googled it. That confirmed it was indeed a puffball but was it an edible puffball or a ‘poison pigskin puffball”?  Now I regretted not leaving it in place to whither and dry into a bona fide horse fart. Disgusted with myself, I tossed it over the bank into the Mersey River and went back to looking for errant strawberries.

Floating down the river.

Puffball on the River Mersey

Later that night I dreamed I could see the the domed roof of a mushroom coloured Volkswagon beetle floating down the river. I was running along shore trying to catch it but it was always just out of my reach and I finally gave up and stood there with a strong sense of disappointment and watched it bob along towards the falls. Now I am sure it was not the dream which generated the disappointment but the life-long regret of never having my horse fart to stomp. In the grand scheme of things, if that is my greatest disappointment then I must be doing okay.

(c) Judy Parsons 2012

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