Salt

In our house, salt comes in a big cannister with a hatefully large spout. This isn't Morton's; it's some kind of organic sea salt, presumably fresh from the Pacific, no doubt harvested somewhere in northern California, or perhaps Oregon. None of this "shaker" stuff...

***

The other day, the boys decided they wanted French fries, or Freedom fries, so they started cutting up potatoes, and soon they had a huge container of them, and of course they added salt. Enough salt to make it look like a picturesque winter landscape, perhaps from Idaho.

But then Madeleine dumped out the Pacific-fresh, chemical-free salt into a giant, pristine white dune on the dining room table. I had the good sense to remove the evidence before the Salt Committee got up... But at supper on Saturday night, I needed salt for my food, so I grabbed this backwards-looking gizmo called a "shaker," filled with conventional salt, which a guest who understood about the complexities of salt in our world brought to our house about a month ago. As I shook it, the Salt Committee urged me to use the fresh-from-nature's-pond substitute, and I said nothing. But Ian, who knew the whole story, volunteered the following, very abstract hypothesis, using his new academic language:

"What if that salt was extinct???"

I changed the subject before the E.P.A. got a chance to investigate.

(December 10, 2011)