I put it on my tongue.

I nodded, not knowing what scurvy was, but feeling suddenly important, as if I had been let in on a secret that the rest of the world had forgotten.

The girl declined. But I understood. Not everyone gets to taste a mother's bush. Not everyone has a mother who shows them that the wild, overlooked things are often the most worth savoring.

There was a bush at the edge of our garden—scraggly, unkempt, and utterly ignored by everyone except my mother. She called it her "secret bush," though it was hardly a secret. It grew beneath the cracked window of the laundry room, a tangle of slender branches and small, waxy leaves that turned silver in the afternoon sun. The neighbors thought it was a weed. My father wanted to dig it up. But my mother would kneel beside it each spring, running her fingers along the stems as if reading braille.