There's a Fungus Among Us

My friend Ruthie posted about finding a mushroom growing in a houseplant recently. I don't know that I have mycophobia (I don't eat mushrooms, but it's because I don't like the taste not because I'm afraid of them), but I am not fond of finding mushrooms growing where I feel they shouldn't be. Perhaps I just feel that fungus could take over the world, and this is thanks to this story I read in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology when I was little.

Last year when we moved into the house, I found some mushrooms, the kind that you buy at the store, embedded in various places close to the patio. I uttered my disgust and dug them out with a stick before finding another stick to throw them over the fence, chopstick-style. (You think I want to *touch* one of those things???) On a day later that summer, I found a few more of those mushrooms growing, and they were instantly dispatched. As I wandered the yard, I noticed two large reddish-orange blobs under some bushes. I thought they were leaves except that we were nowhere near leaf-changing season. Upon closer inspection, I saw that they were a second variety of mushroom. "Ewwwww," I screamed, and grabbed a shovel to dig them out. The first one came out easily, but the second one got somewhat defaced, and I was afraid I was just spreading the spores so that they could infest our yard. Plop, they went over the fence.

Earlier this spring, back near where I planted the lilies, some thin, short, small white mushrooms had sprung up... the kinds that grow a lot in a cluster. I think at this point I made Hank get rid of them because I was shuddering at the thought of these mushrooms that appeared from nowhere.

It has been raining on and off since May, days at a time, so that it's been quite damp in the yard. Saturday morning I looked out into the backyard and saw what appeared to be two tall white tees with large golf ball looking things sitting on top. Was Hank playing a trick on me? Was that some special thing he had put outside to help the grass? As I squinted my eyes, the horror dawned on me that these were MUSHROOMS. Mushrooms that had NOT been there the day before. Mushrooms that had sprouted six inches overnight. I told Hank to come look. We went outside, and he marvelled at them while I complained about how sick it was. That's when I noticed... two mushrooms of variety #5 a few paces away!!! These were flat and short. I had the foresight this time to take pictures of these freaks of nature too.



"My parents never had mushrooms growing in their backyard," I complained. Of course, when I got to my parents' house last night, I noticed that, although not terribly noticeable, they had some mushrooms growing in the front!!!