Honey or Weed?

Both bring me strong memories. Not surprisingly, one is sweet, the other bitter.

Sweet is a strange memory. Rather, a non-existent one.

The first time I went back to my country after years of absence, I opened a pot of honey, and tears flooded my eyes.

Funny. I have no memory of having much honey in my childhood or youth while I lived there. I didn’t grow up with tea and toast with butter and honey.

In this life, the memory of honey is of beef, lettuce and pineapple – to my family’s horror, one of my favourite meals when I was a teenager -a large lettuce leaf with a piece of braising steak on top, crowned with a slice of pineapple dabbed with honey. I’ve never been a sweet tooth.

Why the tears then?

Maybe they come from another time, another life: the days – aeons ago -when I was a fairy when I used to steal cream from the top of the milk left to rest on a corner of the stable. Then, I would fly with my treasure carefully placed on a herb-Robert leaf, steal a drop of honey from the bees, and go and hide inside a crack in the wall to enjoy the most delicious, selfish treat.

The bees went mad, and the cow got madder. She thought the robbers were the bees.

Silly cow! The milk bucket wasn’t even close to her by the time the delicious cream rose to the top.

They are just very jealous creatures, the cows.

The bees are ok.

The second smell brings many unpleasant, bitter memories: the memory of my first husband, forgetting his newly-wed bride, lost within the smoky swirls of weed and the heavy cloud of equations his mind loved to solve.

It also reminds me of my unfaithfulness to him, with that lovely young man – us “grassing” – as we used to call the sweet doing nothing we indulged in when we had a free hour between classes at the University in Bogota.

It also reminds me of a trippy trip that made me feel the sky was crushing me and there was no air to breathe in the whole wide earth. The claustrophobia lasted for over thirty years.

Then it reminds me of splitting up with my husband, desperate for proper communication, and feeling I had to leave him to his weed and his equations.

Finally, it reminds me of so many young and old, who at first seem to profit from its use as it helps them calm down, to become more paranoid and isolated as time goes by.

More broken relationships…

Bitter memories that bring tears to my eyes, not of longing but of loss