By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 2011

October dawn. She kneels where three oaks
remember last winter’s deepest cold,
breathes in: wet leaves, limestone
releasing its mineral breath,
and there, underneath, that first faint summons.

Not mushroom exactly.
More like earth’s most private conversation,
the one between root and fungus, sugar and rain.

Most hunters use pigs or dogs.

She stopped needing intermediaries twenty seasons back.

Her grandmother knew:
“The oaks tell first, if you listen with your whole face.”

Taught her to read the calendar of soil:
how September smells like promises,
November like sealed envelopes.

This morning’s different.

The scent pulls left where it should fade,
doubles back like smoke writing questions.

She follows, nose low, reading the story:
wild boar passed here Tuesday,
rain fell wrong, washing scent uphill somehow.

Then she understands:
two colonies growing,
their territories overlapping in one perfect confusion,
white truffle courting black
across the darkness neither can see.

She marks the spot with hazel stick,
will return when December’s first frost
makes them desperate enough to sing their locations clearly.

For now, lets them dream in their buried palace.

The restaurateurs from Milan pay in cash,
weigh her findings with ceremony.

They’ll never know about mornings on her knees,
learning which questions the dirt answers.

She drives home through villages that smell:
bread rising, diesel exhaust,
the green pause before rain.

Parks where her garden releases its own news:
roses folding inward, basil going to seed.

In the shower, washing October from her hair,
she closes her eyes, sorts the day:
oak tannins, sharp, territorial.
Clay traces, cold, clinging.

And still there, faint as starlight:
that dark perfume worth more than gold,
the secret handshake between species:
the million-year marriage
she’s privileged to witness by nose alone.