MITSUBA IN RAIN

Mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica), Japanese wild parsley, is a wonderful wild herb not only because of its delicate parsley-y, celery-y, faintly lemony fragrance, which goes so good on sushi, in misoshiru and other dishes, and not only because it grows from early spring throughout the summer and into autumn, but also because when you go to gather it you have to walk around bent right over staring carefully at the ground in search of those three shy, irregular leaves down there under all the higher plants, thereby causing you to notice everything that is going on underfoot of your otherwise generally look-straight-ahead daily life.

For lunch we were having both sushi and misoshiru, so I went out into yesterday morning's rain with a double sense of purpose. Needless to say, everything down there was wet, but now the ferns are curling up, as are most of the other plants, but from here and there in the multicoloring undergrowth peeped the bright shining rainwet leaves of the mitsuba, saying "pick me!" "Pick me!" It didn't take much wandering to gather a large handful of the tiny light green leaves; just a sniff of them honed my hunger.

On the way back to the house I stopped at the oak logs stacked under the cherry tree and harvested a handful of just-emerging shiitake to round off the meal.