Tasting Mothers Bush //top\\ -

My friend looked at me like I was feral. But my mother came out with a glass of lemonade and offered the girl a leaf. "Try it," she said softly. "It tastes like being alive."

Once, when I was thirteen, I brought a friend home. She saw me pluck a leaf from the bush and chew it thoughtfully. "What are you doing?" she asked, horrified. "That could be poisonous." tasting mothers bush

"Go on," she said, plucking a single leaf and holding it to my lips. "It won't bite." My friend looked at me like I was feral

There was a bush at the edge of our garden—scraggly, unkempt, and utterly ignored by everyone except my mother. She called it her "secret bush," though it was hardly a secret. It grew beneath the cracked window of the laundry room, a tangle of slender branches and small, waxy leaves that turned silver in the afternoon sun. The neighbors thought it was a weed. My father wanted to dig it up. But my mother would kneel beside it each spring, running her fingers along the stems as if reading braille. "It tastes like being alive

I nodded, not knowing what scurvy was, but feeling suddenly important, as if I had been let in on a secret that the rest of the world had forgotten.