This is the World in a Tiny Leaf

If you've ever read Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" you will understand where I'm going with this. Proust's narrator takes a bite of a madeleine and is instantly transported to another time and place in which he reunites with all the characters and places and events of his far-away past. Indeed, Proust was able to write seven novels using the rich imagery that one food memory evoked. So it is with me and basil.

I don't know exactly what it is, I'm still analyzing the swirl of pungent memories arising from a single whiff of basil. Rubbing a leaf vigorously, I nearly swoon from a scent so potent as to bring on a tumble of images, words, faces and feelings. The most prominent memory that springs into consciousness is of my grandmother, mustachioed but kind and loving, 4 foot 11 but giant in my esteem. She was the gardener, the keeper of the basil and tomatoes, grand conjurer of string beans and Swiss Chard. We ate well in that time, when she was with us, our young bodies nourished by green, growing things stirred in big pots smelling of sauce and basil, always basil. She was tiny, and had to reach up to drop the ingredients into the steam. That's one of the many instantaneous images basil prompts: My tiny, round-bellied, Italian-accented, smiling, kind, wonderful grandmother cooking for us at the stove in our kitchen.

There are other images in other places: our country shack just outside of Princeton, in an enclave of Italian immigrants, each having brought the other, surrounded by farms and silos; my numerous siblings running around unkempt and half-naked, playing in the wholesome dirt; being bathed in a wooden tub under the hand pump in the yard; Italian neighbors visiting under the grape arbor, the smell of espresso mingling with the sweet tang of concord grape; drinking spring water straight out of the earth from a giant ladle. My grandparents farmed there, growing the usual crops needed to make "minestre" or minestrone; "giambotta" or vegetable stew. Although my siblings might recall things differently, I trust my memories. The knock over the head I get when I smell those ingredients converging in a pot, tells me they can't be false.

Finally, the memory most cherished is of my own small-statured mother, long after my grandmother had left us, surveying the garden, smelling this or that herb, wearing her silly straw hat. She always had basil stuffed into her shirt pocket so she could smell it all day. I see her, still young but now aging, earth mother, makeup-free yet so beautiful to me, as she connected with all that her mother and her peasant ancestors knew to be valuable. She reaches for the basil, brings it to her nose and crushes it between her fingers. The look on her face says what I now know: "This is a world in a tiny leaf."

Menna

2017 September 24