Wee Little Men in Hats

Plans for the summer now include a Job, I am so happy. There was a spot open in the summer school program at the sixth grade level, half days, and I grabbed it. I will be with the other teachers that I work with, the students are familiar with me, and the five week curriculum is a reading program based on Egypt.

Other obligations include catching up on the three commissioned portraits I need to finish, getting the new dent out of my car, I would love to sneak in three visits to friends in Mass, Fla, and my son in DC. These are regular missions, nothing I can't share in conversation. However, here is something I am reluctant to share with people that see me on a habitual basis, but am willing to tell only you. It's off-putting. It's secret. Shhh.

A bar of soap had slipped between the tub and under-the-sink-cabinet, a narrow space dedicated to collecting cat hair and yuck. Not that it's hard to keep clean, I have devised a bent coat hanger with a wadded paper towel sort of invention that I spray with cleaner and thwack forward. Sometimes I use a chopstick, which does well in a pinch but doesn't reach the furthest city of mung.

This soap has been there for maybe a month, you all know how time flies and who worries about soap? A grey kitten I would have rescued immediately. Soap can wait.
Besides, soap means clean, right? Not on this bathroom planet.

Hum de dum, down on the tiled floor, all those white hexagons that I enjoy making patterns with during scrubbing, looking all bumblebee honeycomb and 1950's. I reach my paw into the crevice, for the soap really isn't that far in, twiddling fingers coax the bar out and jesus b. jesus, mushrooms are growing out of the end that was closest to the floor. Brown, stalked mushrooms, like in your lawn. Not mildew, rust, yeast, or smut, but fleshy-bodied fungi, the kind I studied in mycology in college.

I feel like the cruddiest, depraved harridan in the village. Mushrooms. I am growing mushrooms in the bathroom. My lord, this as almost as bad as the corpse of Lenin, which began to grow stalked fungi years ago, so they had to toss him back in the vat for refreshment in order that the people didn't have to view his glassed remains with le bouquet de champignons behind his ear. Next they'll be sprouting out of my own ears, my nose, between my tatas, my butt, all those dark, moist, human spaces seen on PBS.

Then the science kicks in, the embarrassment sort of fades, and I wonder what the hell is in the soap that mushroom spores can use to form mycelium? The essence was supposed to be grapefruit, milled in France, pink, natural, on-sale soap found in many department outlet stores. If the fungi can use this as a medium, there are no anti-bacterial chemicals contained in the making. Ding goes the lightbulb.

My bent this year is towards the organic cleansers for, as I have stated, if I can't eat it, I am not cleaning with it. We pour too much into the environment, all these gallons of cleaning agents manufactured everyday, where does it all go? Some dissipate into the air, others are pulled by gravity, eventually finding the water table.

Also, and a visible result in my home, is that my cats are not going through the cycle of vomiting that would occur after washing the floor with the usual cleansers. Cats cannot process the phenols found in many products, resulting in liver toxicity or digestive tract irritation. I do use a dilute bleach solution for cleanup around the litter box, but no one goes in until the chlorine has evaporated. I would not be surprised if the organic cleansers are why there is a toadstool jungle in the john.

Time to go dig out the coat hanger and the bleach. I dearly love the idea of mushrooms, but not as a hidden source of spores or bathroom decor. There are thousands of unidentified LBMs in this world (mycologist for little brown mushrooms)and I have not a clue as to what these are, but I will try to find out--the stalks are woody, so the species is not Coprinus. Later, if you knock at my door, you may find me tripping in the seventies, if they seem to be the hallucinatory Psylocibe (no, I don't really do that stuff--life is too weird already). Stay for supper, for if times get as hard as I think they will, we may still dine like kings.