In my 1970s rural PEI childhood, fresh mushrooms were a seasonal thing that we gathered ourselves; winter mushrooms came from cans.

Every autumn I would go with my parents to Ellerslie to pick meadow mushrooms in a pasture near the farm where my father was born and raised. Dodging cow pats, we would harvest the little white mushrooms, checking they had soft pinkish gills underneath. That was the only mushroom we knew to be edible, and I assumed or was told that the “toadstools” (ie. every other type of mushroom) would be poisonous. That turns out to not be true, but we didn’t need to be adventurous as the meadow mushrooms were plentiful and we could pick what we needed, never putting a dent into the crop that was in the huge field.

We had a summer cottage on the land where we now have a year-round house. We would stay at the cottage until after Thanksgiving, which was always a huge family gathering with lots to eat and a big roaring fire in the fireplace. I would walk our long lane each weekday morning in September and October to catch the school bus and, on my way back in the afternoon, would pick the meadow mushrooms that occasionally popped up in our yard for my mother to fry to have with our supper.

This morning I put sunflower seeds out for the blue jays and chickadees, our year round friends and neighbours. I picked four lovely meadow mushrooms (Agaricus campestris, iNaturalist tells me) that popped up overnight, and cooked them for my mother to have with her supper. I gently moved them around in a bit of butter, and they were soft and tasted of the past, when the labour that went into such a treat meant they were regarded as precious gifts.