kitchen mint

a small mint, sometimes called the breakfast mint, of unusual olfactory memory. crushed between two fingers, the leaf releases a smell that resembles less mint than the kitchen mint has lived in: warm bread, the kettle just off the boil, the morning of a day you remember liking.

well-behaved in a pot. it will not run, though one variety sends a single rootlet through the floorboard each summer to keep track. flowers rarely, and only on a day with no rain by noon. see also the kitchen, the early hours of dawn, the steady work of the ritual, and any morning that began with someone else awake before you.