Salt

Photo Credit: Faran Raufi

For weeks, we had no salt. Saltless: the breakfast eggs, the lentil soup, the chili, the noodles. We looked at the saltshaker in disbelief that something so elemental and cheap in our time and space could be so lacking. When (at last) I snatched some minutes to buy salt, I perused the gamut with disproportionate enthusiasm: Iodized Salt, Garlic Salt, Popcorn Salt, Rock Salt, Coarse Kosher Salt, Canning and Pickling Salt, Celtic Sea Salt, Violet Sea Salt, Himalayan Pink Salt, Red and Black Hawaiian Salt, just Plain Salt. Perhaps we understood a little more what having salt means: how medieval Moors traded salt for gold; how Roman soldiers drove oxcarts of salt crystals up the Tiber from the salt pans of Ostia; how the Israelites offered salt as a sacrificial offering to the Universe-Maker, God.

This microblog is part of a current series called “Grace-glimpses.”