my daughter asked to keep a little notebook of things we find together, and my first impulse was to buy her a proper field notebook with good paper and maybe a hand lens (obviously the beginning of another shopping expedition), but she meant the half-empty one she already had. she wrote our names on the front and drew the dogs badly and accurately, all elbows and urgency. i was so delighted i nearly made it into a project with categories, then she told me where to write and handed me a purple pencil. being included under her rules felt unexpectedly lovely. also she has given me one page only until i demonstrate that i can stay on topic, which seems harsh but evidence-based

went into the woods intending to look for exactly one thing and came home with muddy knees and no useful record of it, but somewhere along the way the tight feeling behind my right eye had eased, probably because i was looking farther away than the width of an invoice. i sat on a fallen log to fix my boot and stayed there feeling my breathing settle while a mosquito conducted a very thorough examination of my ear. my ankle was fine until the last uneven bit, then reminded me not to celebrate prematurely. back at the truck i was hungry in a wonderfully uncomplicated way, not coffee-hungry or forgot-lunch-hungry, just ready for a sandwich and somewhere to put my feet

i found a spore print in the shoebox that is beautiful and almost completely useless because i didn't label where it came from, and now i'm trying to reconstruct an entire afternoon from a stain on the paper. there's a grocery list on the back, which narrows it down to an afternoon when we needed milk (excellent, practically a date stamp). dad thinks he remembers the photograph i sent him, but he's remembering a different mushroom from a different year. i could put it in the unknown pile and move on, except now the little brown mark at the corner might be a leaf fragment and i want to know from which tree. the unknown pile is apparently where i live