New England

New England is the setting for the narrator’s later psilocybin experience with Judith, and its significance lies in how a once-familiar home becomes at once vividly present and painfully bound to the past. The former house, garden, and writing room do more than frame the afternoon: their accumulated memories shape what the narrator perceives and feels.

The former home and its remembered landscape

Many months after finding the mushrooms with Paul Stamets, the narrator ate them with Judith during a summer week at the New England house where they had once lived. The place was already freighted with memories before the experience began. They prepared tea from two small mushrooms each, following Stamets’s recommendation to cook them to reduce stomach upset, and drank both the liquid and the crumbled mushrooms. While waiting for the effects, they set out along the dirt road near the house.

The walk quickly became difficult for Judith. She felt unwell and wanted to be indoors, but they were at least a mile from home. She described her mind and body as separating, then imagined her mind flying out of her head and up into the trees. As they hurried back, the wish to feel safe indoors became urgent; when a neighbor’s pickup appeared on the road, they ducked into the woods until it passed. The familiar route home had become, for a time, a place of exposure and apprehension.

Garden, memory, and presence

Back at the house, the narrator sat on the screened porch, where ordinary garden sounds seemed suddenly amplified. Later, Judith rested on the couch with a cool cloth over her eyes, absorbed in changing images on the coffee table. She wanted to remain with them alone, while the narrator, still concerned for her, understood the rest of the afternoon as a kind of parallel play.

The narrator then walked through the garden toward a small writing house built twenty-five years earlier. The garden’s dragonflies, rattling plume-poppy seed heads, and heavily scented phlox were perceived with unusual intensity. That intensity was inseparable from the place’s history: the garden had held many summers of their life first as a couple and then as a family, yet they no longer lived there. Its sudden vividness therefore brought not simply recollection but a sense that a precious memory had returned to life, beautiful and cruel in its closeness to loss.

The late-August season sharpened that feeling. The garden seemed ripe and temporarily complete, but the narrator imagined the approaching killing frost ending its thrum, bloom, and perfume in a single night. In this setting, attention to living things carried both wonder and grief: the more immediate the garden became, the more clearly its momentary flourishing appeared to be passing.

The writing house and the meaning of place

The writing house gathered another layer of time. The narrator had written two and a half books there, including one about building it, but by this visit its shelves had been emptied and the room felt abandoned. From the daybed, the narrator looked through a screen at the arbor and the old climbing hydrangea planted decades earlier. Its leaves filled the window, making the view seem like a world seen through a green veil. The structure that had once served as a workplace now held the evidence of a former life and offered a vantage point from which nature seemed newly present.

The experience opened the narrator emotionally toward parents, Judith, and even the plants, trees, birds, and insects on the property. The transformation remained open to competing interpretations: it might be understood as a spiritual encounter with the personhood of other beings, or as a drug-induced alteration of perception. New England is where those explanations meet in a concrete landscape. The house and garden neither settle the question nor reduce the afternoon to scenery; their remembered particulars make the narrator’s sense of wonder and immanence inseparable from the knowledge that this familiar home belongs to a life no longer being lived there.