A Story About Herbs With Many Tangents In Between

When I was a child, my neighbor and dear friend Erica and I often got bored. So bored, in fact, that we once spent an entire weekend crafting a book called, What To Do When We're Bored. To make this splendid book, we spent all weekend on one of the best computer programs ever, Creative Writer.

photo: creative writer amazingness

So, yes, we were bored children. On a particularly boring day, prior to the creation of the gem, What To Do When We're Bored, we decided to go door-to-door selling herbs. However, we first had to find herbs to sell. My house had an abundance of mint so we harvested that first. We loaded our herbs into Erica's Radio Flyer (mentioned in Friday, March 30th 2007 prior posting). So we had mint, and that was about it. I believe we managed to find some basil from a garden we had started at one point in our lives, and we found chives at my house, although the chives had grown so large they didn't actually taste like chives anymore. It was more like wheat grass with a hint of chive.

Let's recap: we had basil, chives, and mint. Some would think these three herbs could sustain a very healthy business in herb selling, but we wanted more! So what did we do? We realized where we could get herbs: our neighbors yards! Perfect. Erica's neighbor had a huge bay leaf tree and a massively overgrown rosemary bush. We pillaged the neighborhood and looted the green treasures.

By the time we had all our herbs together, we began bickering. (We had the most fights over Scatergories category answers. For example, is a llama considered a farm animal?) This time we fought over the pronunciation of herb. Was the 'h' silent? In the end, we agreed it was silent based on the fact that it was silent when Erica's sister said she wanted herbal essence's shampoo.

After that minor setback, we started knocking on doors selling our mostly stolen loot. In the end we made about $7 dollars. The best part was went we went to Erica's neighbor's house. She decided to purchase the bay leaves from her very own yard. At the time I didn't realize how awesome it was that we sold something to someone that they already owned. We were such rebels.

photo: bay leaves

As a strange aside ending, I just remembered how much I hated talking to neighbors because I was so shy. I'd tell Erica that I'd do the talking after she told me she talked at the last eight houses, but then I'd knock on the door, panic, say nothing and Erica would end up talking to the neighbors.