The Taste of Green

The smell of crushed clover always brings me back to the damp earth of a childhood garden, where the grass was cool enough to soothe a scraped knee. There is a specific, sharp sweetness to a blade of grass when it is torn—a raw, chlorophyll scent that clings to the fingertips like a secret. We spend so much of our lives trying to be civilized, to sit at tables and use silver, yet there is a primal, quiet joy in the act of grazing. It is a return to the soil, a way of tasting the mountain itself. My jaw aches with a phantom memory of that crisp, fibrous snap, the way the juice of the earth coats the tongue. We are all tethered to the ground by what we consume, by the way the seasons change the flavor of the air we breathe. Why do we forget that we are just another creature, hungry for the simple, sun-warmed bite of the wild?

Naude Visser has captured this raw connection in his image titled Vegetarian Dalmatian. It reminds me that even in the vastness of a mountain, we are all just looking for a taste of home. Does the earth taste as sweet to you as it looks?