I wasn’t standing in some enchanted forest when it happened. There was no ceremony, no dramatic revelation, no lightning bolt of inspiration. I was just walking across a perfectly mowed yard with my grandfather, heading toward the orchard the way we did every weekend.
He stopped at the edge of the woods where the briars grow wild with blackberries — that tangled barrier between the tidy lawn and everything untamed beyond it. He bent down and started inspecting a few weeds with this intensity, like he was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see. Then he picked a few leaves off what I assumed were just briar bushes, stuck them in his mouth, and started chewing.
I stood there, stunned.
He bent down again, picked a few more, and handed them to me. “Try it,” he said. So I did — because he was my pap, and I did whatever he told me to do.
The instant I started chewing, a tingling sensation flooded my mouth like taking a huge swig of spearmint mouthwash. My brain lit up. What? It tasted like chewing gum and breath mints, and yet it was just a handful of leaves growing wild in the briars at the edge of the yard.
It’s not that I hadn’t known plants were grown for food. I knew that. I’d been tending my grandparents’ garden and orchard for years. But something about that moment — the wildness of it, the fact that this intense flavor was just there, growing abundantly in a place nobody cultivated or tended — cracked something open in me. Plants had uses and powers that went so far beyond what I’d ever considered. That handful of leaves was the first time I realized the world was hiding things in plain sight, and all you had to do was pay attention.
That curiosity never went away. It just waited.
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