Relative Something

Quite a while ago, we discovered that a person we knew from our school days in Eden Prairie was a volunteer for elections in our township. She and her husband own a log home nearby on the Rush River. We plotted getting together for lunch, but somehow failed to accomplish it for years.

Yesterday, we finally made it happen. Ann and David showed up at our house, and the minutes flew by as we shared snippets of our life stories over a fantastic meal and a tour of portions of our property. We found Dave to be a wealth of knowledge about our plants and trees.

I queried him on the demise of the maple in the labyrinth, but he was stumped (no pun intended) as to why it died so mysteriously.

Right away in our woods, Dave spotted golden oyster mushrooms on a downed tree and alerted us that they are good eats. We gathered a bunch to try cooking up.

That is definitely a discovery for us, as we’ve never considered eating mushrooms growing in our woods. When we first moved in, we spotted some that looked like the coveted morel mushrooms with the irregular honeycombed surface, but we weren’t confident enough to try them.

We learned later that it was very likely that they were morels, and we could have consumed them. Sadly, we’ve never seen them growing here after that time.

Dave went on to share his experience cooking down wild plums, making juice from wild grapes, creating a lotion for skin out of jewelweed, and he pointed out one other edible berry I didn’t know about on our property of which I’ve already forgotten the name.

The most important discovery is that we need to get together with them again soon, as we share many commonalities and a similar respect for the natural world in which we live. We are looking forward to seeing their property and strengthening the surprising number of connections we discovered during this initial all-too-brief visit.

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