SHIITAKE CONFISCATION WRITS AND RELATED MATTERS

With the shiitake now emerging, each morning I go outside and steal a march on the monkeys by harvesting the biggest open mushrooms and leaving only the buds to expand. This is good also in that, apart from getting me out of the house before breakfast, it gives the often crowded mushrooms some elbow room of the fungal sort.

Though in fact I haven't seen any monkeys around here recently and I'm not sure why, I'm not going to fall for that trick again, where Oh boy the monkeys are gone, tra-la; maybe someone else along these mountains was foolish enough to grow pumpkins, upon which many a monkey magnate has built his fortune and spun a political reputation, often unworthily conferred upon a ne'er-do-well son or two and down the generations, to the detriment of the species, as has been known to happen in our own world.

Or maybe the simians have gotten sapient and gone into the city for work—you certainly can't hope for much of a career in the forest--could be any number of reasons I suppose, who knows why monkeys do the things they do, they're like teenagers in that regard as I recall (when I was a teenager I didn't know why I did the things I did either); still, I'm not taking any chances, even if the monkeys are elected officials by now, or come into my garden waving Shiitake Confiscation Writs. These are MY mushrooms, as long as I get them before the monkeys do.

Aren't higher laws great?