All winter long the fallen tree lay dormant in the cold, blanketed by snow. In the spring, Amanita spores, expelled by the previous year’s crop, warmed themselves in the sun and drank the spring rains.
In general, mushrooms hung out in groups, leaving the trunk to wonder if something in the natural order of things demanded that different species stick to their own kind. The forest was a laboratory, a controlled environment for the study of relationships. Some long. Some short. Some in-between. In the mega-history of all life, the cycle of decay of a fallen tree was less than a millisecond, but compared to that of the mayflies flitting through the woods it would take eons to complete. Like any analysis of quantitative information it was all in the way you looked at it.
A walk in the woods was misleading. Fallen trees that looked like they had just keeled over had been lying in the dirt since the hurricane of 1938. The tree felled by the wind in 1955 was still a youngster by fallen tree standards. Viewed objectively, its decay was about life and death, both at the same time, all of the time, a dizzying spin of cycles of change. One thing nurtured the other, then turned around and sucked the lifeblood out of something else. Relationships were formed. Some lasted only minutes, others years.