A Secret Place

Everybody has a secret place, a place that no one else knows of. My secret place is just a twenty-minute train ride and then a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment in the center of Oslo. It is beautiful and quiet—a small clearing in the woods where, from a distance, you can see the cityscape and observe the activity on the Oslo fjord—but these qualities are only the added value. What attracts me to the place, and what makes me guard the secret of its whereabouts so carefully, are the mushrooms. In a small stretch less than a hundred feet long on the west side of the clearing, hidden in between blueberry bushes, mosses, and slowly decaying leaves, there is an abundance of chanterelles. Together with the newly fallen bright yellow birch leaves, they light up the dark ground like gold ore.