Revenge of the Mint

I like to think of it as Revenge of the Mint. When I was a kid, I used to wait for the school bus next to a granite boulder alongside my parents' driveway. Sometimes, on chilly mornings, my dad would let me sip his coffee. No matter how much cream and sugar he had put into it (and the man has quite a sweet tooth), it always tasted bitter to me. But I drank it anyway, because coffee was verboten and therefore exciting. It still tastes bitter to me, but I don't drink it anymore because as an adult, coffee is plebian and dull, a symbol of all that is quotidian.

I mean, I would drink it if I liked it, pedestrian or otherwise. But since I don't... And besides, coffee makes me poop.

Anyway, back to the granite boulder, which was really more of a middling rock with boulder aspirations when viewed through child-sized eyes. It was a nicely rounded hump of granite, sparling pink and white and black, and completely overrun by mint. Fuzzy, fragrant, silvery green mint.

Or, to my parents' way of seeing things, that goddamned mint, rangey and unstoppable. So my father (I suspect my mother's hand in this) ripped it out. I was indignant. Why, why on earth, would he rip out the mint? It smelled good! It was pretty! It wasn't hurting anyone! I felt much the same way about his method of taking stray dogs for a "drive out into the country" (we already lived in the country) or plucking out my unsuspecting wobbly tooth when he swore he was only going to look.

And then he threw the mint into the ditch. I don't know that it was actually an open sewer. It seems hard to believe, in these days of fastidiousness and antiseptic towelettes, but at the time, in all the rural areas, the yards were bordered along the street by big ditches. They were full of standing water, mosquitoes, and - as a direct result of the mosquitoes - obese burping frogs. Ours were scary, housing all manner of dark goblin-esque creatures. Friends who lived in a development sufficiently nice to have tidy grass-lined ditches (But not so nice as to have no ditches whatsoever) used to wait for summer thunderstorms, when we could all turn out and play in the roaring splashing water that sluiced through the ditch. Back in the day, we were too dumb to know about the dangers of being sucked down storm drains.

And ditches, apparently, are where despised plants went to die. Cattails, of course, and weedy-looking things, but also tiger lilies and "ditch irises" - tall butter-yellow irises which, unfathomably, only grew in ditches.

And mint. Before the summer was halfway to August, our ditch was full of mint.

"Well I'll be dipped in shit," my father muttered, scratching his head head and staring at the mint, resilient and triumphant, clambering over the banks of our ditch. Because it wasn't only there, of course. Oh NO - the fuzzy little herb surrounded the granite hump once again, smothering it exuberantly and, if such a thing can be said of a herbacious spreading perennial, with just a trace of nya-nya insouciance.

So my father, knowing when he was beaten, poured gasoline all over it.