The Book I Did Not Plan to Love

October twenty-fourth. I picked it up because the cover had a mushroom on it and it was three dollars at the community center book swap, which is not a principled reason to choose a book but has, historically, served me well. It is a foraging guide, not a recipe book, not a memoir, technically a foraging guide, and I have spent the better part of three days reading it like it was a novel, which it is not, and yet.

The part that got me is the section on learning to read a landscape. The author, a botanist who writes like someone who has spent a great deal of time alone in the good way, keeps returning to the idea that foraging is less about knowing what a thing is called and more about knowing what a thing is doing. Where it grows relative to what else is growing. What the soil underneath is saying. I read that passage twice and then I read it a third time with my finger under the line, which is something I do when I want the sentence to slow down.

The re-read-the-sentence face.

I don't forage. I am not going to start foraging. I live in an apartment and the nearest woods are forty minutes away on the bus and even if I got there I would be the person who crouches over something and photographs it and then eats the gas-station sandwich I brought from home. But I kept reading. I think what I was reading about, underneath the chanterelles and the water-loving plants and the thing about reading a landscape, what I was actually reading about was attention. How you learn to have it. How it becomes the thing you are actually doing when you think you are doing something else entirely. The cord on the windowsill would agree, probably.

It is on the coffee table now with a dried leaf marking page forty-seven, which is where I stopped last night when it got late and I hadn't noticed. That seems like the right place to stop. Not finished, just, the light changed and the room finally said something.