Are You Seeing Amanitas?

 I am. I'm seeing them everywhere I see pines.  The classic "toadstool," this is the Fly Amanita, Amanita muscaria var. guessowii. (The varietal name refers to the fact that these are yellow, not red, as is the classic Fly Amanita.)

 

The name Fly Amanita refers to the fact that in Eastern Europe it was used as an insecticide, supposedly lethal to flies, when powdered and mixed with milk.

Why anybody would want to spray milk mixed with poisonous mushrooms around is anyone's guess. I think I'd rather have flies. Here, let's spray some milk with poisonous mushrooms on the kitchen window, where the flies gather.

Each September, I enjoy watching them push up through the pine needles under white pines. This year, for the first year, they're coming up under our Virginia pines, too. I mow around them.

Such a beautiful huge mushroom! Can you imagine eating something like this? Apparently, having psychoactive compounds, it was (is) used as a hallucinogen in Siberia. They must be hard up for a rush in Siberia. I wouldn't eat them on a dare. But then I don't go around swilling vodka, either.

 

These are growing on an abandoned homestead only a couple of miles from my home. I used to buy brown eggs from the lady who lived there, and I used to talk to her husband as he mowed the fields nearby. Both are gone now. She told my neighbor after her husband died that he came in from working in the fields, sat down in his chair, and "his heart blew up." She was another ten years or so behind him, struggling to keep the cattle and always out working in the garden, buff Orpingtons clucking around the fenced area under the pines.  Their farm went to auction, but I don't know who bought it.

 

 We'll see if they're the kind to mow around mushrooms.

Thank you, everyone, for all the kind and lovely comments on "Requiem for a Black Snake." For the beautiful Mary Oliver poem, for your stories and your electronic hugs. I felt them. Now I'm going to give you one back. Over at PureFlorida, that crazy FloridaCracker has gotten hisself a captive-bred Florida kingsnake and named her Zick. And here she is having dinner. Kind of helps balance out the bad snake juju going around, to have him out there, naming a beautiful little jewel after me. Although I admit it is a bit unnerving to see my namesake massaging the nether regions of a pinky mouse.