What we have

Tonight you're getting a agave-powered, personal blog. It's an entry that isn't sober but it has been with me for days and is flowing and I've wanted to write this tiny imagining everytime since first I smelled the the basil plants.

Trader Joes, fading flower of capitalism, has had huge, rude basil plants ($2.99!) most of the summer. These are giant, grasping things that you'd normally find bolting at the end of the growing season but miraculously are solid plants, not leggy.

I very much wanted Mary Jo and Grandma to visit among those basils, those smells, this summer. What would it have meant to them to come upon this bright green gift together- like holding hands? I can see Gram's eyes excited by the promise of elegant survival. Did she ever use basil for anything but canning? For Mary Jo, the distinctive smell would rush her into ancestral connections. I bet she can remember when they had that great tomato harvest in 1813 and they didn't have enough boards to sun dry all of them.

Somewhere together, Mary Jo and Gram live such a beautiful connection that most people are desparate to possess. It's a long call to belonging and a short walk to the garden of where we make sense of things. We think that the power to connect is so deep that the lucky ones have some sly understanding about how it works that the rest of us don't have. About this you can bet that MJ and Gram would say something like "You are so full of crap"

The truth is that each of us has something that looks back and springs forward and invites connection. Such a thing, an authority, is like carrying an extra weight. Nothing at first is as difficult or later becomes as easy as the thing that is native to you. Over time, you bear up, and you can heft those things that once weighed strangely.