I have fond memories of puffballs and their moon because twenty-eight years ago, a friend called me up with some news. “There’s a lady out on the street,” he said, “with a real big mushroom.” I went to see the sight, and there, indeed was a young woman holding what was to become the world’s largest puffball mushroom (calvatia gigantea), 18.38 pounds, 77 inches around. In our conversation years later, the woman told me that her giant fungus (“Puffy, as she called it,”) had made the 1990 and 1991