We got the weed from Mary.

Mary is my sister’s godmother, and kind of mine too. She and her recently-deceased husband John lived in a six-storey rent-controlled walk-up on the upper east side that was full of six decades of crap. To traverse it, you walked in tunnels carved through the crap. John was the kind of guy who saved the boxes that things came in. And books, maps, plants, the sails of ships, shells, rocks, telescopes and flags. The apartment had a wooden loft bed and, despite having floor to ceiling windows, was dark.

When John died last year, Mary got rid of 200 black bags of crap. She gave it to 1-800-JUNK. Now it’s all cleared out, you can walk without tunnels and the stuff that’s still there is personal, beautiful. Light floods in. There is a bluejay postcard tacked to the door — her totem animal, she said. The neatly arrayed instruments, a wooden recorder, a dulcimer banjo. A stack of rare books, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that she saved from the black bags.

She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin with ten siblings and knows every plant and small critter in North America. It was she who taught me them when I was little.

Walking the East River, the morning she gave us the CBD gummies and the spliff, she showed me a tree. This is a dogwood, see? The veins run out and along the edges of the leaf.

It’s the only one that does that.