1.
I’m never certain where my stories really begin, so excuse me if I pause the flow and take another step back. But first it starts with the spring, season when the world and my daughter are born. Also the time when I fill a series of pots with peppers. The peppers started before my daughter, but really, if you go back, the peppers started before me, or us, or this land we call a country. (Now there’s a digression waiting to be born. Back to the peppers). The peppers started when some human crunched a small bright berry and found its alchemical burn, liked that pseudo fire as much as I do, encouraged the plant into a thousand forms and fires like a warm hug or an arc welder.
But I guess it doesn’t start there, with a person, because first the plant found a defense to discourage the mammals that crunched its seeds to uselessness without bothering the birds who scatter whole seeds about. I like to think of this after a reaper burns my lips until I can barely focus. The fire is a warning I don’t heed; we are the species that fights past pain, finds pleasure in the victory. Are we supposed to triumph over nature so? Or is there harmony in tending and growing, knowing the roots and saving the fruits?
2.
You could say also, for me, it started with mint, a lovely plant, berry-less. I never thought of that refreshing chill as a weapon. Not until my roommate told me he was allergic. For him mint is poison. The brush of a leaf, like poison ivy, it’s oily trail blistering his skin. That is what mint wants, though most of us miss it. I think it aims for insects, my friend is caught in the crossfire of mint’s cold war.
I would bathe in mint, infuse the air until every touch stings, winter cold in summer. Winter now and I still fight summer, always wanting to defeat heat, which brings us back to peppers, my late summer harvest, bright yellow orange, citrus fresh and zesty, their fire cools my blood. But back to mint, my childhood friend, as candies then competed for mint intensity until surpassing sours passed mint by. I popped them all, stronger the better.
3.
I graduated from mint to heat, as I burned into adolescence. In the end, is adolescence where it begins? When I woke to the world around me being broader than the crosstown bus could take me.
