Wonderland

Iola and I have been reading an illustrated, abridged version of Alice in Wonderland. It misses out many of the weird hallucinatory sections I half-remember reading to Maya while she coasted on morphine during a long ambulance ride through the New Mexico desert, and it seems to linger instead upon details from Iola's own life: an older sister, a frustrated rabbit, a series of brightly colored mushrooms, a set of playing cards which are impossible to shuffle.

I'm probably not in the best position to give my children advice on staying safe, but I gave Iola a big talk on never eating mushrooms (she looked relieved, she doesn't even like mushrooms on pizza) or berries, or things she finds in the woods, or anything past it's sell-by date, or take-away chicken, or candy from strangers... Several minutes after her eyes started to glaze over I realized I'd fallen back into the rut I've occupied these past few weeks where everything seems to represent a risk. Iola's tactic is to quietly stop listening (you can tell she's not listening from the way her eyes become a slightly glassy shade of blue, and then close). Maya has developed a different strategy. A few evenings ago, I gave her a pep talk about walking down the lane to visit friends - 'Have fun, but keep to the left, and stop if cars come towards you... Don't walk on the verge because there might be poison ivy, and if you see a bear make lots of noise, and telephone me when you get there, and if you see any power cables down you absolutely must not touch them.. and you mustn't touch fallen branches in case they are attached to fallen power cables and ...'
'Mum', she interrupted, 'Do you know this song?' And she gave a fair rendition of Tom Petty's 'Learning to Fly': "I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings; coming down is the hardest thing." Damn right, Tom. Damn right.

So, after the warnings provided Iola with the excuse to never even try a cooked mushroom for the rest of her life, we went out for a walk in the woods to see how many types of mushroom we could find. For the record, I stopped counting at 16.

 

Hunting for mushrooms was good physical therapy because it made me have to try and look at my feet - not easy with several inches of metal sticking vertically through my neck. Iola wandered along in her own little Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy land and Maya found new routes through the trees. Scared of missing something, the dog tended to stand on each mushroom just after I'd photographed it; Nathan, I suspect, had a slight unspoken sense of disappointment that we didn't find chanterelles (the only kind of mushroom we felt able to safely recognize).

Afterwards, having found no March Hares, Dodos, Mad Hatters or Cheshire Cats, we collected up a large bag of trash left by day-trippers who had stopped on their way to or from the State Park and emptied their Dunkin' Donut coffee cups and beer bottles and yoghurt cartons onto the grass. If I saw them I would be all for chasing them with a rolling pin, but Iola prefers to be Queen. As she would say, 'Off with their heads!'