Sassy Basil
I'm having tea for breakfast because I ran out of coffee five days ago. There is some oatmeal on the stove incubating. I didn't use enough water so it almost burnt up but I added extra water and now it seems fine although lightly toasted. On the breakfast table is a basil plant wrapped in a clear plastic cone and if you keep the roots wet (there's no dirt) it will live for a while and be your fresh basil supply, even though when alone you rarely cook anything more ambitious than toast, or oatmeal, two things which generally do not benefit from fresh basil. Although I guess there is something you can do with a toast-like product and fresh basil, if you add some other ingredients. I would rather not at this time delve too deeply into the depths of my culinary in-expertise.
But the thing about these fresh, plastic cone-wrapped basil plants is I think they are grown in a controlled laboratory or some otherwise stress free environment and they suffer from it. They don't really smell that sweet. They smell like a picture of a basil plant. Or if you had a basil plant next to a mirror and you sniffed the mirror, that is what this plant smelled like.
I say smelled like, past tense, because I, not entirely on purpose, quit watering the basil and it shriveled up to a state that had you seen it you would have surely remarked--looks like you thoroughly killed that basil. I thought so too and felt that pang, that unique, resonating anguish we living feel about death. Though, as it was only a plant, my anguish was relatively short-lived. I felt the anguish and then in probably only a matter of minutes was thinking about other things, like who would win the Superbowl. Is it true you can never remember who lost the Superbowl? If you are ever faced with the question of who lost a Superbowl you could play the odds and guess Minnesota or Buffalo, with their eight cumulative losses.
It was likely a state of denial that had me so summarily moving past the demise of the basil and conjunctively, watering it after it was dead. The miracle here is like that reworded blues standard, my basil come back to me, and in the first day that formerly thriving, dull-smelling basil plant, which was now barely a wad of chloroform, showed some effort to live and in the days following showed not only the will to live but the desire to thrive, wrapped in plastic on my breakfast table.
It is now back to its former state of good health and we--the basil plant and I--joke about the past as if the past has no other purpose but to amuse us.
You know basil, you smell a lot sweeter now than you did before I almost killed you.
Yeah, well, you know what they say--what doesn't kill you makes you sweeter.
I think that's--stronger.
What?
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
If you say so.
Hey basil, don't sass me or I will make pesto out of you. And put you on a piece of fancy toast. With tomato. Some olive oil. A little mozzarello. Salt and pepper.
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