Just checking in.

I’m still reading Braiding Sweetgrass. I’m now in Part Three, Picking Sweetgrass, and just finished the first chapter, “Epiphany in the Beans.”

I love the book, and I love its author.

How can you love something so much that you can’t love it more?

And then you do.

It’s partly because Kimmerer and I are so much alike. We couldn’t be more different, but our minds are so much the same.

She has the advantage, being a woman, a mother, and roots that go back to the beginning. But it’s not a competition, and we both know that.

She eases me past the intellectual loneliness which often strikes me down. She helps me find in myself more of what’s already there.

She even infuses the way I write. I’m becoming more of what I am.

I mention her, I see I do many times, because, partly, it’s my devious plan to get even more people to like her, read her, and by extension, like me, read me.

But, obvious as that is, that’s not quite it.

It’s more because my whole life wants the world to be better, and, cunning me, I know the more people read her, the better the world becomes.

And because we both have simplified the words to one and the same, love.

I used to live on Peach Street in Monterey Park, Southern California, suburban to L. A. We had three peach trees in the yard of the house we rented.

When they grew peaches, I would watch them every day.

The peaches grew larger, getting closer to ready ripe.

I would hold my hand under a peach. Test its readiness by a caress.

Not yet.

Then, the day. The peach fell into my hand.

I sat by the trunk. I bit into the gift of love, juice dripping down my chin, ate it to the heart, and held the pit.

“What should I do with it?” I asked the tree.

The tree waved a branch. “Plant it over there, not too close to crowd, but where I can watch over my family, see my daughter sprout, grow to sapling, become tree, flower, bear her own children, which you can share, as you have done with me.”

I sit by the trunk of my tree, kiss her bark, we both look up, at the same sky, the same sun.