The Left Hand Holds the Salt
Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
I have Multiple Sclerosis. I thought I told everybody that but it turns out a bunch of people don’t know. So now you do.
It means I have a wobble. I hide it. I feel very self conscious about it. Most people don’t know or are stunned to find out. I push forth a glamour that does its best to keep it all under wraps. But my left hand is unsteady from disease. More unsteady that your typical left hand. At least according to my doctor.
And they’re the expert, frankly.
It comes up in my day to day, and I wince when reminded. When I hold my keys in my left hand and they doesn’t sit easily into the lock, I tell myself that this is the path. That this is initiation into the imperfect.
But I really have to face it when I hold the salt.
Salt magic is sea magic; I have salts from as many coasts as I can get my hands on. Whether cooking or consecrating, not that there’s much of a difference, salt brings me back to the roar of the Atlantic and the hum of the Pacific. The two oceans I have known. When one ocean screams, another chuckles.
I grew up with the salt of the Atlantic stinging the scrapes on my knees, but it’s the Pacific salt I manage to get everywhere. I’d been noticing it for a while, the wobble, trying to not think it was illness, but the salt tells the truth. I was salting boiling water with the fancy tin of harvested luxury salt from somewhere on the California coast. It cost me twelve dollars and I wanted to use it sparingly. But, my left hand did its dance and salt spilled on the burner, in the pot, on the floor, in the cuffs of my jeans, the folds of my shirt, everywhere. A thumbnail’s worth remained in the tin.
Surrendering to my body is mortifying. There was a full three second breath cycle where I tried not to clench my jaw and allowed the flush of embarrassment to pass in the steam of the pasta water. I swept up the salt; I wiped down the range.
The water wass perfectly salted.
From then on, the left hand holds the salt.
There is no measuring or teaspoons or even the perfectly manicured pinching and tossing into the pot. However much the hand shakes in is however much it needs. I harvest my own salt now.
A year ago tomorrow, my father died. I had spent the weekend at what my dear friend and I call the Dead Beach. Where storms wash up bones and abalone and hagstones. I brought a liter mason jar to catch water for salt.
I spent my father’s death day harvesting the salt. Boiling seawater until nothing remained but the white crust at the bottom of the pot.
Salt is grief for me. It’s the left hand path. The indicator of loss and illness. The remaining crystals of tears. It shows all the things I want to hide from other people. A wobble, an unsteadiness, anything outside of pristine. It’s a slight deviation from normal, hiding in plain sight, and that’s what chronically ill people have to try to do all of the time.
I hold grief in my left hand, and let my illness tell me how much to spill. Enough to make me salty like the sea.
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