“There’s something I thought I’d write about, but I’m afraid it would offend you,” he said. “When I woke up this morning, I was thinking that I associate a different herb with each girl I’ve known.”

“Like what? I don’t understand.”

“Like the girl in high school that I never pursued. I think of her and I think of hashish. That was her herb.”

“Hashish is not an herb.”

“Sure it is. And the one who broke my heart - she was basil. I never used it until I moved here to be with her, and she turned me on to it. She grew it and cooked with it, and so I learned to love basil.

“And my ex-wife, I can’t think of an herb for her. She was always salting everything, though - even ramen. She was a compulsive salter. So I guess salt would be hers, but that’s not an herb. It’s a spice.”

“So what am I?”

“You, my dear, are rosemary.”

That makes sense. I’ve been cooking roasted potatoes with fresh garlic and rosemary a lot lately. The other night, I made pork chops pounded flat and stuffed with rosemary, portabellas and bleu cheese.

And I have fond memories of rosemary. Years ago, I worked for a wonderful Catholic priest named Al. He had a huge pot of rosemary that lived upstairs in the rectory during the winters. It was as big around as I was and lush and springy – like a big pot of green dreadlocks. It was obviously someone’s pet. Seeing it made me want my own pet rosemary more than anything. Now I have one, although it’s not as big as that one was. It’s living in the greenhouse this winter, and it summers on the porch. I trim it and cook it up, and more grows. Rosemary is generous. And it bears a resemblance to lavender, which I also love.

So I’m mostly okay with being rosemary. The ‘mostly,’ the qualifier, is because rosemary is also for remembrance, and remembrance always has at least a tinge of melancholy to it. (That’s appropriate too, though – more than one person has told me that I have a tinge of melancholy myself. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.) The problem is that remembrance is inevitably of things past. And right now I don’t ever want this person, the one who thinks of me as rosemary, to become past tense.