Ghost Pipes and Summer Rains

WINDHAM - Hopefully the critters living around Windham don’t mind me foraging in their woods for acorns which are plentiful in the early fall.

There are a lot more of them than will ever become trees which makes me wonder “why all the extras?”…but each one seems to serve a purpose, a comforting even if wrong thought for a cosmic pipsqueak.

On my walks, I pick up some acorns for my chipmunk chums down here on the edge between the mountaintop and the valley, scattering them on the back porch where they disappear pretty fast.

I ran across some Indian Pipes, or Ghost Pipes as they are also known, “a rare, waxy-white perennial wildflower that lacks chlorophyll and lives as a parasite on underground fungi,” Wikipedia says.

Somebody should ask the pipers how they feel about being called parasites because they are beautifully silky and willowy white.

They were tucked under some pine trees, in the same vicinity as clusters of different kinds of mushrooms which there is likewise a plethora of, with all the rains that have fallen this summer.

How did people discover mushrooms could be poisonous? Trial and error I guess. Not a great idea for a couple on a first date picnic, drunk on amor, thinking,“hey, let’s try one of these”…ladies before gentlemen, please.

It is pleasant on occasion, in this line of work, to ramble on senselessly about something rather than trying to make sense of things.

That is particularly true of politics which I once read somewhere boils down to who gets what, how and when, although there is more to it.

Who is the one. or who are the ones, determining who is going to get what and what they have to do to get it, sounds closer to reality.

I also read once a quote attributed to a guy named Luther Price, who supposedly said what might be good advice for young politicians.

“Be what you is, not what you ain’t; ’cause if you ain’t what you is, you is what you ain’t,” the filmmaker and sculptor is said to have said.

I have heard that very similar words were inscribed on the headstone of an Old West gunslinger, advising those of us not yet pushing up daisies, “be what you is, ‘cause if you be what you ain’t, you ain’t what you is.”

The latter one sinks in better for me, letting me be the way I be because at some point I won’t be, so who will I then be?

Pointless drivel, but I like to think there will someday be a day politics won’t be the way they be…and if a rose, by any other name still a rose be, what does that say about you and me?