That day, the ground was dark and damp, carpeted with rotting leaves and punctuated in places by dead stems. Scanning the tufts of grass, I spotted a small group of mushrooms emerging directly from the earth, without leaning on wood, without nesting on a stump or root. Their dark, almost velvety appearance and the blackened gills that seemed to weep a dark liquid led me to believe they might be Velvety Teardrop Mushrooms (Lacrymaria lacrymabunda).

Their name already says it all: these are mushrooms that "weep"—leaving a dark ink beading at the edge of their gills, as if oozing a buried memory. Their brown caps, sometimes edged with strands of hair, evoke fragility beneath the harshness. They are said to have no real culinary value, and their identification remains sufficiently uncertain to warrant caution.

What struck me was their sudden, almost dramatic emergence in the middle of nowhere. No wood to degrade, no other vegetation to colonize: just the bare earth, and them, like a discreet sign of the continuing cycle.