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Mow mint for a fresh-smelling lawn, for tea and for medicine. Or let it grow and let your yard be a travel destination for bumblebees and honeybees and butterflies. The noxious bugs don’t like mint. But the flowers are loved by the pollinators. Mint is a fresh coolness even in the doldrums of summer. The flavour is a visceral hallucination of temperature, just as hot peppers are of heat. No matter what the thermometer says, these things will change your perception of temperature.
I lived in the heat of a desert long ago. The roads threw up hallucinations of water, mirages. When the land hallucinates, we see mirages. I’ve witnessed them over the ocean, across the tarmac, across the paved highways, and over the dust of desert. In Newfoundland, I’d gaze out across the north Atlantic and sometimes I would see upside down islands on the horizon. I never visited these islands, but spent hours looking at them, wondering if the people, creatures, and plants knew they were being viewed upside down. Did I look upside down to them, too?
But the heat mirages are the most vexing. Why, on the hottest of days, must I look out and see puddles, lakes, and oases? What is the bitter ironic physical law which might show this to some poor soul dying of thirst?
I lived in the heat of a desert long ago. The roads threw up hallucinations of water, mirages. When the land hallucinates, we see mirages. I’ve witnessed them over the ocean, across the tarmac, across the paved highways, and over the dust of desert. In Newfoundland, I’d gaze out across the north Atlantic and sometimes I would see upside down islands on the horizon. I never visited these islands, but spent hours looking at them, wondering if the people, creatures, and plants knew they were being viewed upside down. Did I look upside down to them, too?
But the heat mirages are the most vexing. Why, on the hottest of days, must I look out and see puddles, lakes, and oases? What is the bitter ironic physical law which might show this to some poor soul dying of thirst?
