Mushroom

I don't tell him how ugly I felt that day as I walked down Valencia Street towards the book store. It wasn't important. What was important was that I had the notion to pick up a a book about living abroad in China. See, this week, I want to research and plan exactly how we will start a new life in Hong Kong. It will work, I tell him. He's scared because he's never done anything like this, and who will take care of the dog while we are gone? My mother, and don't worry, I'll take care of the important things, I tell him.

But then, I remember the garden.

Last spring, I began planning my paradise community garden. I take notes in my mind whenever I pass the abandoned plot of land near our apartment complex. I ache to till and sow until paradise arises as beans, lettuce, peppers and squash. The owner of the land has okayed the project and all I need to do is dig into the dirt and plant some seeds.

But today, I discovered Virginia Woolf. I've listed her books in chronological order by publication date but I thought I would start with Orlando, or To the Lighthouse, or A Room of One's Own, because I own these, and I have never read them. I don't know which to study first, so I study all in fits. And then I lie down and read a book by a different author, one who writes in the present tense, who reminds me more of myself then Virginia Woolf ever will. To this new and different writer I want to say, I understand or, I emphathize, even though my own life experience was never so bad as I remember.

I exaggerate to survive.

Amidst the travel planning, the internet searches, the making of large chicken sandwiches, the feeding of the dog, and the walking through tall green grass damp with morning rain, I forget to tell him how ugly I felt walking along Valencia after sitting next to the pretty girl who writes experimental fiction and remembering that ugly girls are cursed to mediocrity and that mediocrity equals death.

I do tell him about the mushrooms that I saw on my morning walk through the park. He is alarmed and asks me if I ate one. I tell him about Babar, the elephant, who moved to Paris and developed a taste for fine men's clothes, and how the King of Babar's village ate a poison mushroom and in the picture book picture turned shrively and green, then died.

I don't tell him about the mushrooms that I saw in the field where the dog chased the ball. Mushroom villages. Tiny roofs like acorn caps over short beige stems. A mushroom with fine black and white pen lines, turned up at each corner like dainty tea cups. A mushroom like an ice cream cone, layered in black, white and pinkish-beige. A flat-roofed mushroom with unobtrusive construction like the white modernist couch in the shop window by the bookstore on Valencia Street. They, the wall, in between, made of tweezed roots and mushroom tea. Succulents glowed in the window like paradise.