JOY ALONG THE WAY; SMALL GESTURES CAN HAVE EXPLOSIVE RAMIFICATIONS

The smallest action can sometimes change the course of your whole day. On my way to pick up the morning paper I pass my sweet basil patch -- two plants. Usually I just bend down and flutter my hands in the plants' purple foliage which gives them a pleasant fragrance for a couple of hours. Yesterday I broke off a blooming spike of it and thrust it into a breast pocket. Close to my nose, I enjoyed that inimitable fragrance all day. In addition, that gesture set off ramifications that lasted all day.

After reading the paper, enjoying the purple perfume all the while, I thought it would be good to learn more about this plant. I knew, vaguely, that it belonged to the mint family. It had the telltale square stem. The World Book is usually my first source of additional knowledge. "The leaves," said this compendium of knowledge, "are tooth edged." I took the spike from my pocket for a closer look. It did, indeed, have tooth-edged leaves but much softer than the saw-tooth edged leaves of my big oak.

Other information gathered here was the enumerations for sweet basil's uses in cooking because of its pleasant clove flavor. I broke off a leaf of my pocketed sweet basil and chewed it. The clove flavor didn't come through for me, so I broke off one of its little flowers. This was better. I didn't have any dried basil in my spice cabinet to experiment with, but I imagine the clove flavor would have been more pronounced.

Next I consulted my spice chart to be found in a cabinet drawer under a pile of dish towels, rubber bands, an almost-all-used-up tube of household cement, an assortment of batteries and fuses. Hence, the spice chart is seldom used.

The chart gives the use of basil either fresh or dried in appetizers and soups, meat and poultry, seafood, vegetables, cheese, eggs and bread. What! No poultices?

I went to my row of cookbooks and pulled out "Joy of Cooking." On page 530 it says, "Basil is, not without reason, called l'herbe royale." But it doesn't elaborate on what the royal reason was. That's disconcerting to the reader who wants to know more. Such style in literature should be banned.

"Serve them (the spikes) as they do in Italy -- where basil is very popular -- in a bouquet of sprigs set in a small vase of water," the cookbook went on to say. Serve? Not decorate the table as in a centerpiece? I'm going to try that I thought. Sunday, when the kids (middle-aged they are) come to lunch, I'll have some flowering sprigs in a crystal glass filled with ice water. They probably won't question. But when they see me reach in for a spike and chew it like a rabbit, one of them might say, "Did you take your medicine this morning, Mom?"

I tried to think of the Basil I've encountered in literature. Was it in "Snowbound?" No. I looked it up and read it, a pleasing thing to do on a hot August day. Was it in Cotter's Saturday Night?" No. "Evangeline?" Yeah, Evangeline and Basil off to the Cajun country, I thought. No, that was Evangeline and Gabrile. Took me much longer to read this old Longfellow masterpiece. Where are you Basil? And why do I think you are somewhere in these old poems? I'm sure you're somewhere in all those books that overrun this place. But you may be some movie I've seen. Movies don't leave a residue in my mind like printed literature.

Oh, I know about St. Basil, one of the early Christian Fathers, was saving him until the last. Could he possibly have had any connection with the mint, basil? I renewed my acquaintance with St. Basil, monk of the mid 300s. I noted that he lived in eastern Asia Minor, now Turkey. So, out came the World Book again to study the agronomy of old Turkey. Figs and barley. Horse mint, maybe, since it is thought to be the mint referred to in the Bible.

Oh, well, I'll come across you again somewhere, Basil. In the meantime, I'll just keep on enjoying my sweet basil, the fragrance and the taste.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.