The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

Once we were sitting silently together. Suddenly one of us began to laugh. It was contagious. There was no reason for our laughter, but we began to giggle and the next thing we were rocking in our seats and howling, howling with laughter, tears streaming down our cheeks. A wet spot bloomed in my crotch and that made us laugh harder, I was banging the table and fighting for air,

wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it. And having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn’t know he existed didn’t seem unthinkable. Not if it was what the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?

I learned that you could leach the bitterness out of acorns by boiling them in water, that wild roses are edible, and that you should avoid anything that smells of almond, has a three-leaved growth pattern, or has milky sap.

I also memorized the Universal Edibility Test. It’s a good idea to know, since some poisonous plants, like hemlock, can look similar to some edible plants, like wild carrots and parsnips. To do the test, you have to first not eat for eight hours. Then you separate the plant into its different parts—root, leaf, stem, bud, and flower—and test a small piece of one on the inside of your wrist. If nothing happens, touch it to the inside of your lip for three minutes, and if nothing happens after that, hold it on your tongue for fifteen minutes. If nothing still happens, you can chew it without swallowing, and hold that in your mouth for fifteen minutes, and if nothing happens after that, swallow and wait eight hours, and if nothing happens after that, eat a quarter of a cup’s worth, and if nothing happens after that: it’s edible.