Elle and I were walking along the front road that flanks the Great Lake in a county at the end of the last mile. We ran into Anna with her dog and walked together. The wind bit hard. It was nearly April and spring was in the light but not the air just yet. I was in a discussion with Anna about a friend who was no longer a friend. We stood at the side of the road while her dog stopped to forage. The ditch dipped down and then leveled off in criss-crossing grey-brown bramble, leafless and wet with winter’s mantle. 

Elle sidled up to me and, though I was in a conversation, said into my ear with a nudge and a nod toward the ditch: ‘Is that mushrooms?’ Thinking now about her tone and her urgent gesture, she knew something was unnatural.

Anna continued talking about the end of the friendship—a serious topic that gets you wondering how to figure endings and the way things change over time—so I was tuned into her. 

Elle nudged me again and asked: ‘Is that mushrooms?’ using her insider voice. 

I looked down into the ditch where she indicated. Two light-brown round protrusions broke up the grey ground cover of spindly tall grasses. They looked a little plush and overlapped each other, like mushrooms you’d see in a damp forest in August, not in March. Elle was looking to me like I was the authority in these parts—she was from the next county. Spring is spring at the same general latitude. But looking at those skin-coloured rounds amid the danker pallor of winter’s end, I suspended logic and conceded that yes, I thought they were mushrooms. 

We walked on and didn’t mention them again

The next day Elle and I walked a similar route, this time on our own. We slowly made our way, looking for the path into the brush for the cut-through that would get us inside the land. I can’t call it wild; more like pastoral.

Just then, Elle went off the road into the ditch. 

I thought she might be after some red dogwood for a flower arrangement, but she called to me: ‘Come here now.’ It was an order. 

I walked on, looking for the path around there somewhere, and she ordered me again. Her voice and the way she stood there, eyes blazing, drew me back to see what she was about. 

‘Look. The mushrooms,’ she said. 

I peered into the brush and saw them. Not mushrooms. Two bare breasts on a headless torso. A toy. For men. 

We didn’t have words other than somewhat stupefied commentary about the supply and the demand for such toys.

Twenty steps on, Elle gasped and drew me down into the ditch again. It was the bottom half of the toy, from the waist down to legs cut off at the thigh.

A slit gaped open in the middle of it where a man would, well, you can guess.

“But how would that work?’ I sounded as naïve as a child.

Elle picked up a stick and poked the form. It was soft and pliable. Mystery (about men and this toy) solved in one poke of the stick. 

‘Where’s the head?

Probably back there.’

‘Who would throw it here? And why?’

‘His girlfriend, maybe, before she threw him out.’

If there was one. 

I barely knew what to think

It’s a cultural given that makes its way into any social and private interaction, from the mouth of a guy with a grin like a cub scout and a giggle from the object of his desire, that a man thinks about sex every something seconds and therefore thinks entirely with, well you know. 

What happens if we stop intoning it, giggling about it, considering it a given. Does it change the culture?

It’s one thing to have the toy in his arsenal, in his private domain for every few seconds needed. It’s another to throw it away on lands not his own, a cultural and physical blight that will take generations to dissolve.

What problem went away in his act? 

Elle messaged me to say that when the earth is softer, we could go back and bury the torso and pelvis in the ditch. A good mission that might give us a laugh and a memory of the day we… 

…cleaned up his mess.