Kneeling by a Toadstool

I went outside on a gloomy day which can be ideal for photography because you don’t have to contend with glare or your own shadow.  Instead I noticed a different shadow, a mental one.

I was practicing for a trip to Brazil we’ll take at the end of next month.  I thought that I would take macro pictures of day-lilies, but I became enamored with tiny toadstools instead.  After a couple of weeks spotted with frequent rainstorms, these cap-like spore-bearing organs of fungi were blossoming in the moistened earth. I even saw a small toadstool under construction.

The circle of what would become the cap was being made with a thin spring coiled and stretched along a string-like fiber, and I, a former biochemist, was watching a protein helix and a protein pleated-sheet (like those that make up our fingernails) come together into a single organ.  It was like I was watching microscopic chemical reactions on a macroscopic level.

Building Toadstools
by Jeter Skeet