Mushroom engine and ocean wires

You know, my grandma and grandpa built the town they lived in.

Grandpa used to be a stone mason, (and a contractor at that, so a free mason is not too far fetched), which I found out only after he died. I sometimes entertain myself imagining asking him about illuminati or even snooping through his science journals for any secret remarks. I fancy myself a detective and see him even possibly? playing along and sneaking some notes my way while openly denying any involvement. It’s funny how sweet and cultivating that bond is. Completely imaginary, yet it nurtures me the way I think grandpa would, if he had a chance. Or is it truly him sipping into me through the mark he left in the hearts of the people around me? His presence truly never goes away, it replenishes, just like his mushroom tea that used to stand by the kitchen window. Absolutely normal mushroom, no hallucinations or anything. When soaked, though, it would make the water taste like kvass. You’d drink some, put more water in, and the mushroom would replenish the flavor. You didn’t even have to change the mushroom! It was basically living in that water, and the “flavoring” was just a byproduct of that living (pee?). I loved that concept of never-ending almost-kvass (especially since I never had money for the real thing), and wondered if one can make a perpetual motion engine out of it (if it’s never ending?).

Grandpa died some 15 years ago, and now grandma is getting by on her own. I talk to her over the phone (or rather over the brittle skype-to-cell bond thing that apparently still exists these days), and she tells me the stories of her childhood, the struggles she’s gone through, and the world as it’s been before I came around. She pours the stories down the mic of her dial phone, through the cell towers to the skype centers (I imagine), where it’s re-molded to travel down the big thick wire under the ocean all the way to me, where I cradle those stories onto a piece of paper lying around that night. I take notes now, less I forget something and it’s gone forever.

When I think of her before the madness, before grandpa died, I imagine those hot summers she’d work in the fields, almost immune to the sunlight (or rather outsmarting it). I wonder if she learned from the sun the art of stinging – she’s got quite a sharp tongue. She’d work that soil, digging potatoes, taking them out one by one and into the buckets. And when the breeze came, it would swing the garlic grass with its tiny heads, not yet developed but fragrant. The breeze would make grandma turn and realize that the tall sunflowers turned away from her to catch that last glimpse of the sun. Did the days feel too short then?

I remember those canned peppers that dad loved. They grew only in that region, I guess, and grandma would use just the perfect brine I don’t know the recipe of. The peppers here are either too spicy or too mild or plain, and it’s growing into my life’s mission to find the right thing. Just like one day I’ll find that magic tea mushroom and make the ever-going engine, I’ll also find those peppers and bring them to dad to see that big smile on his face.

All that richness and life that soaked the fields, the smiles, the walls, it must still be there somewhere, it can’t just disappear, dissolve in this gore and chaos. I’m sure it’s hiding somewhere, behind the gooseberry bushes in our backyard, in the branches of the cherry tree I could never climb, in the soil depleted by sunflowers, or in those potatoes that nobody dug up that last summer. I hope some piglets got to those potatoes, sensing grandma’s love that would nurture and protect them through the minefields and airstrikes in the months to come.