Mossy Pride

Anyone who's hung out with Josie for any length of time lately will be familiar with the term "mossy," which roughly translates as "geezerful," as in "Grrrr! Will you please turn off that mossy radio station! I am trying to listen to my iPod!" It can also be a noun: "Mossies always want to walk everywhere! Can't we take the car?"

Mossiness is mostly about age, but not entirely. For instance: Dad is mossy, but Barack Obama, born the same year, is not. (We might be able to explain this paradox by comparing Malia & Sasha Obama's assessment of their father's mossitude with Josie's... We suspect that "parental" may be a subset of "mossy.")

The opposite of mossy -- in case you're wondering -- is "grassy," but somehow it doesn't come up quite as often, or at least not so pointedly.

Well, when we made it up to Mount Desert Island we found it to be a vertitable paradise of mossfulness. The weather turned cool and misty, crazy mushrooms popped out all over the place, and we all began to appreciate the beauty of soft green moist things growing close to the ground.

Josie found the most incredible red-flowering lichen growing on the deck outside Mona's house and spent an hour drawing it. Mikala and Andrew discovered a whole moss shrine at Thuya Garden and tried to look as mossy as possible while Simon took their picture in it.

And on our last day there, when we came home from Day Mountain in the rain and found ourselves facing at least four hours before dinner, with far too much manic energy to be contained in one small house, Mikala and the kids donned rain gear and went out into the woods to look for signs of fairies. It turns out moss is a favorite roofing material of the Wee Folk. Also useful for lining fairy beds, filling cracks in fairy walls, and laying out fairy paths across the rocks.

So next time some impudent grassy throws the M word at us, we'll stand tall and wear our bryophytic epithet with pride.