Autumn is Here

After five years in Vancouver, I really did think I'd seen it all. Coming from the Caribbean, the thrill of four different seasons (petal-ruining rain, picnic-spoiling rain, fall-leaf-beating rain and bitter-cold rain, all clearly distinct from each other) was strong. For the first year or two.
After a while, though, the delight fades. Yay, cherry blossoms. Yay, summer berries. Yay, Jack O'Lantern pumpkins the size of small children, which, by the way, you cannot eat. The pumpkins, that is. Yay, tiny boxes of mandarins on 'special' for $6 a piece at Safeway.

So imagine my delight when, while strolling through a nearby park today, I found that more than the trees were hailing the coming winter with the fall crimsons and golds. There, amongst the overgrown and still-damp grass, were the autumn mushrooms. Not just any mushrooms. These guys were so bright I'm surprised nearby cars weren't stopping to query the presence of tiny traffic lights nestled in the lawn.

Now, I've visited this park many a day, and no such brightly pigmented fungal pleasures were found snuggled in the grass all summer or spring. Perhaps the more autumnwise are accustomed to mushrooms of varied hues popping up in September and October, but in those spring-summer-fall-winter children's books that somehow wound up in the monoseasonal West Indies, no mention was made of autumnal mushrooms.

A few less awestruck parkgoers had apparently taken the opportunity to flatten a few of these brightly coloured growths to find out what they looked like inside, or kick them over to see if anything special would happen once they were out of the ground (nothing did--unless the offenders were beamed up into some invisible mushroom punishment chamber, though there were no abandoned pairs of shoes nearby to indicate such). I was tempted to follow suit, in much the same way as one has to blow a dandelion's head off or step on a particularly crisp leaf.
Having heard what poisonous mushrooms can do, to those who misuse them, however, I decided it was best to stay on the right side of the karmic tracks by allowing these October vibrancies to continue to thrive and bring joy to others on a rainy dull day. Who knows. Perhaps they'll last longer than this year's windblown leaves did.