A dog named Rover is responsible for this image. As expected, I was at the truck yard, somewhere between delivery-jobs on a day that I scarcely remember. A mover’s life is uneventful: days blur together, dates congeal like fat at the bottom of a cooking pan left too long on the back burner of a cooling stove. And so, with dates congealed into an almost gelatinous mass, I cannot name the specific Tuesday or Friday, Monday or Wednesday. Was it a Thursday? All I can say is that I was at the truck yard, somewhere between delivery-jobs, and Security-Chief Rover G. Dogg (for those interested in his full name) was bored. He takes his duties seriously. Sometimes. But in all honesty, there’s very little for a canine security chief to do. I wandered around with my camera, taking pictures of rain seeds and random bits of industrial offal. Rover followed me around, occasionally butting me with the top of his head in an attempt to start a rollicking game of tag. He watched, as I smoked, and then, at a particularly boring point, decided that it would be to his advantage to go sniffing after something edible. It was Rover who found the dead robin, squirming with at least three distinct breeds of maggot. Rover, being of canine inclination, found the smell of rot endlessly fascinating. Up to a point. I suspect that the sight of biological activity rippling beneath sparse and matted feathers, kept his attention for a while. I found myself fascinated by that and wondered just how many horror movie directors must have spent pivotal moments in their lives watching dead things yield to nature. Indeed, my own inner movie director wondered: can you achieve this effect by moving magnetized ball bearings through a sock filled with hand-lotion and coated with feathers? and Just how much does a dead bird made out of latex cost these days? As such questions meandered through the dark recesses of my mind, Rover decided that dead birds just weren’t fun anymore. He ambled off, marked a tree, scratched at a few early fleas (though he now has a swanky, new flea collar, and he’s quite proud that it matches his teeth,) and—by sheer canine luck—stumbled across thee enormous mushrooms. In all honesty he didn’t stumble across them so much as simply knocked them over. The ‘shrooms were of a variety I’d never seen, and I’m quite sure that they were toxic: it not from their own native toxins, then at least from the engine drippings so common in the truck yard. Rover, for his part, cared little for mushrooms, toxins, or anything else that might have occupied my mind. It was—he’d decided—time to autograph as much truck-yard real-estate as possible, and so as he ambled about, writing his urinary narratives on every tree trunk, engine block, and truck in range, I stooped in photographic examination of crushed and broken mushrooms. They were yellowish, slimy, and unspectacular. They were half eaten by bugs, slugs, and other small, hearty things. One of them, the largest, lay stem-upward with its fragile gills parted like the pages of a fallen book, and I spent long, long minutes trying to capture them in the best possible light and at the best possible angle. Since that day—whatever day it was—there have been no new mushrooms, and so the gills I captured are all that I have of their memory. It doesn’t matter. There will be other days and other mushrooms, and I’m sure that whether I see such ‘shrooms in a truck yard or elsewhere, I will remember Rover’s quiet antics, and wonder if—perhaps—dogs might be hired to accompany other photographers on other journeys in search of half-dead mushrooms. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're having a great week.