Have you ever thought about this: the fragrance of the little white kumquat blossom is so intensely sweet it’s intoxicating while the fruit itself is so tangy-tart that one bite and you’ve acquired new dimples that your mama didn’t give you.
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I never have given this a thought until today.
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The nearby strawberry plant in my garden has been bearing little white blossoms as well but these little darlings have no fragrance whatsoever. In a week or so, as if by magic, they turn into the sweetest berries of the deepest crimson. This particular berry plant if mine has been doing this same magic act for the last nine years and I’ve never grown tired of it.
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The fragrant produces tart and the aroma-less produces sweet. Did somebody out there get this mixed up? Not likely. Nature presents us with predictability we can count on. The almanacs from days of yore relied on what they could count on – namely the sun, the moon, the tide, and the changing yet ever recycling seasons. Repetition isn’t necessarily boring though, there’s a comfort to be found in the predictable. It’s something you can count on barring unexplained climate change. But wild nature and growing things and especially predictable human beings will at times throw us a curveball here and there keeping us off-balance.
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When it’s not the overwhelming, borderline damaging type of off-balance, and when we don’t utterly reject the notion of having one foot slightly off the ground, then we might have been presented with the opportunity of noticing the sweet and the tart.
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They exist side-by-side. They seem to take turns on which will produce the other one and that my friends keeps it interesting.
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How about this for hump day? Let’s avoid rut-like predictability when feasible and keep an eye and a taste bud out for the sweet, for the fragrant, and for the tart.
The Daily Cuppa Jo 