Is the Forest a Girl or a Boy?

I'm not supposed to be here, so, shhh!, don't alert the Balancing Blogging with Daily Life authorities. . . . But I just had to share some shots of a picture-perfect Fall day.

This morning I went out with this preschool dropout for a "hike" (his idea) in the wetlands and woods . . .

and, as we were watching the geese and ducks and the turtles and frogs at the pond . . .
with the blue sky peeking through the thick trellis of leaves above us and the sunlight filtering through like a hard-won truth . . .
I realized that nature is the best school he could possibly be in, and that he is a perfect boy on this gloriously perfect day. And I am the luckiest person alive to be sharing this moment with him.

Afterwards, as we walked through the woods, I got to thinking about how gendered a place nature is. I think many people would identify nature as female. After all, "Mother Nature" is a fairly widespread cultural trope.

When I was growing up in rural South Texas, however, the outdoors was considered a decidedly masculine sphere of hunting animals for food and sport and trapping them for pelts. My dad--a hunter of deer, dove, and quail--took my brother along on his hunting trips but not me and my sister. We certainly took family hikes, but I think my father and I saw nature through different eyes. While I was admiring a deer or a family of doves, he was counting the buck's antler points and sizing up the dove family for that night's supper.

I asked my son whether the woods was a boy or a girl, and he responded that it was a girl AND a boy. I like that answer best of all. (The meadow, according to his scheme, is a boy, and the pond is a girl.)

And what about mushrooms, those decidedly phallic forest dwellers?

They are the fruiting bodies, or spore-releasing structures, of the underground parental unit called the mycelium.

The tiny, fragile tips of a mycelium reach out until they encounter the tip of a genetically compatible mycelium. They do a little mating dance and then, when conditions are warm and moist enough, up pops some mushrooms, which then release many spores, each of which can produce another mycelium.

So I guess my son's take on the woods as being both a boy and a girl is pretty apt, at least in relation to fungi.

If you look closely enough at the underside of these delicate mushrooms (which I think belong to the genus Coprinus), you can see the dusty, black spores ready to disperse and find a moist, dark place to grow into a new mycelium.

To preserve my memories of this wonderful Fall day, I plan to try some leaf-preserving crafts, courtesy of tutorials by maya*made . . .
and Resurrection Fern.

And felt another of Lil Fish Studio's acorns with the "mother" of all acorn caps we found on our walk.