Dec 17

Today’s tea was Pure Mint. It smelled like someone plucked it straight from the garden, which is impressive for the time of year.

At least one friend grows mint (tries to) on her winodwsill and we’re always teasing her, saying one day her lawn will go all to mint.

“But I keep it in a pot,’ she says, as if this makes a difference.

News to mint. We did not grow mint up in Scotland but the part of the lawn not going to clover was full of it anyway. The tenant from four years prior must have flirted with it or something. To paraphrase an old priest, who was drawing comparisons with his overflowing kitchen sink at the time, “It’s like the Holy Spirit. It gets everywhere.”

Heaney understands. Have a poem.

Mint
Seamus Heaney

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.