The Free Radical

Sometimes on these excursions I receive a powerful message… but I don’t understand it at all. The only “words” I got were “Infinity can’t be measured.” But let me start at the beginning…

It was early in the spring, before I even began the Daily Forest Reports, when I first smelled a most powerful lemony scent along my path. It made me stop to search for the source.

This is the flowering plant I found. The fresh and powerful scent of its flowers were captivating. I wondered if they would eventually produce berries later in the season… I hadn’t identified the plant yet.

Eventually, I described its appearance to my friend Darren, who is really good at identifying botanical specimens. From the description he immediately declared “False Solomon’s Seal.” By the time we had this discussion, it had already begun to produce berries where the flowers once bloomed, and it was the arrangement of the berries– clustered at the tip– which positively identified the plant.

By this time I had already plucked one of the berries, squished it between my fingers, and had tasted its juices. It hadn’t tasted of much– a disappointment, considering the enchantment of its previous fragrance. I still had no clue whether the berries were edible or not. Darren and I looked it up online. Yup, the berries were edible… but not highly prized.

The very next day I stopped alongside the only two specimens of False Solomon’s Seal I knew of and grabbed the ripest berry to pop it in my mouth. Yup, the flavour was totally unremarkable… a plant I could subsequently ignore. And the very next day after that, I was quite prepared to thoroughly ignore it… you know, some casual but righteous neglect… and here’s what I found:

“But Niels, there’s nothing there,” you say. Yes, exactly! That’s my point. The two False Solomon’s Seal plants had completely vanished within twenty-four hours of my eating one of the berries. It was quite startling… because there was no evidence that deer had come into the area to browse; nothing else had vanished or even been nibbled. No, the fully mature, berry-bedecked plants were simply gone and I have no explanation. Perhaps they will return next spring…

To me, this is an example of a powerful message because it grabbed my attention and piqued my curiosity. The problem is, however, that I have no idea what it means… and I can’t ask for clarification because the messenger has vanished. Solomon’s Seal is the six-pointed Star of David. I had referenced it in a post about Grandmother Spider. Solomon was a powerful mage back in the day. This particular plant was designated as “false.” It disappeared immediately after I ate it…

Perhaps you have some insight into the Unsolvable Mystery…?