Brine

Brining turkey is all the rage these days. Funny I should pull this prompt right before Thanksgiving. I admit, there is a reason brined turkey is all the rage. Brined turkey is delicious. It is moist, it is perfectly seasoned.

Brine is one of my favorite words, and it’s not because of turkey. Brine is the salt water I grew up in. It is the salty rivers that seep into marshes on a rising tide, that nourishes the nurseries for marine life in those high grasses. Brine is the smell of ocean air when driving a coastal highway. It can be warm and enveloping, the scent of summer on Tybee, or cold and raw, the scent of winter in Maine, but it is always wet, and it is always salty.

Brine is a type of shrimp — a tiny shrimp. A shrimpy shrimp. When I think of brine shrimp, I think of those sea monkeys they used to sell in the back of Mad magazine or Archie comics. Were those brine shrimp? The pictures were always so enticing, with castles and underwater alien-like creatures that looked nothing like monkeys.

Salt seems to be a theme with me. I do love salt for salt’s sake, but I love brine for the word’s sake. For the vocabulary of it. Brine evokes multiple senses, and it connotes not only the scent and taste of salt, but the feel of humidity and liquid. The salty liquid of the sea, of marshes, of broth, of genesis.

For the month of November, I am participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.