Once a year, for about a week, if there has been the right amount of rain and the temperature is perfect, the morel mushrooms peek through the leaves and toppled trees.  Last year, Pat found two.  You never know if the conditions will be prefect or not.  Whether there will be any--or not.

But this week, Easter week, they made their appearance and they were abundant.  Pat and Tom foraged through the undergrowth on the back of their twenty acres this afternoon, and found 20 of them.  It is going to freeze tonight, so they picked them all.  And brought them into town so that I could enjoy them as well.  We fried them in butter and feasted on morel mushrooms.  So delicious.  It's been two years since I had last tasted one.  And I'm now hooked.

There are entire Oklahoma websites for every county--posting when they show up.  It is such a tiny window for them to be harvested that everyone celebrates the first ones they find.  They are gone by the end of the week.  If you have never eaten one, you don't know what you are missing.  Few people have ever tasted them because they are so rare.  And nobody is going to share them!!  There aren't enough of them to market.

You have to have uncleared land with trees that have fallen, and decomposed, to have a chance to find one.  And since the majority of us live in town, chances are you will never see one.  Pat has twenty acres, and only about five of them are cleared--so the conditions are perfect to find them--on the other fifteen acres.  Some years.  When the stars are aligned???  So today, Easter Sunday, I ate morels.  I will remember it.  I can't believe that Pat and Tom drove thirty miles into town to share them with me.  At eight o'clock in the evening.  That is love.

Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  Thousands witnessed this event.  But if someone mocks you for believing, think of this.  Eleven men parted their ways, went in different directions spreading the word of what had happened, and never faltered in their steadfast witness of his resurrection.  They saw him crucified, and they saw him resurrected.  They were killed for their belief.  They died alone.  Why would twelve men allow themselves to be tortured and die, each alone, for a lie?

He is risen.  He is risen indeed.