He placed a paper-thin, white wrapper on each garlic clove, then added additional gift-wrapping over the whole garlic head in front of him.
“This will keep the sulfurs moist and fresh until they use them. It’s the perfectly bonnet, cover, envelope, sheath for flavonoids!”
Yesterday, so long later, I noticed this perfect thin, white wrapper. Closing the garlic press I squished the yummy, savory garlic spice into my developing pot of steaming white bean soup.
Gifts, presents, treats — wrapped and placed in containers!
And thinking on it — so many things are like this — oranges with thick, pungent bright orange rinds, bananas with perfectly peel-able yellow jackets, apples with shiny red edible skins — pouches for essential nutrients — my potassium, my fiber, my folic acid.
When fear is high, when uncertainty rules, when the world feels dangerous I find the small, safe, protected container-gifts soothing.
My skin, the bag I live in, all twenty-one square feet of it, holding all my organic machinery — reassuring. 300 million cells in me containing me.
My cottons, my polys, my silks, my linens, my fabrics, my clothes.
My rafters! My beans! My roof tiles! My roof!
My cars, buses, trains, planes — my many-miled metal skins.
I live covered, enclosed, enfolded, encased, protected.
Oh for those who don’t or can’t!
We must take great care of them and bring them inside. We must bring covers to them and keep them safe, the lost, homeless, disenfranchised, the refugees, the immigrants.
This is love, to put a coat over another one. This is love! To put a sheath over life.
I look out into earth’s atmosphere, its stratification, layers, exosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere.
Sky-wrappings enclose me, keep in my heat, hold in my weather, protect me from space rocks hurtling towards the planet — turn meteors of stony iron, nickel and ice to vapor and dust.
Enclosed all — and yet the world reels. They reek. I reel. Don’t you think I’ve haven’t noticed? It reels and I shake from the stabbing, ripping, puncturing execrable, break-through vitriol, vomit, vengeance, venom, virus, vanity and violence. These penetrate our shields.
Yes, a large meteor might annihilate our city. Yes, a volcano may obliterate our sky. Yes, a coronavirus may kill us. Yes, one day the sun will vaporize the planet, but yes, yes, yes today we experience wondrous layers of protection we know, where they came from.
“They’re really going to like this!” he said — bark, dermis, film, membrane, carapace, shell, scale, sheath, skin, hull, capsule, chamber, package, pocket, packet, pouch, layer, strata, sphere!”
Steady yourself soul.
Protections all around.
Modern Soliloquies & Pastiches 