Boiling some smaller pieces of the bark

“People think cinnamon, it is like a little twig, but this is not true. Do you know?”

“Sure,” I said, because I was pretty sure I knew what cinnamon looked like.

“No, you do not know,” Veronica said, sighing heavily, because she was pretty sure I didn’t.

As it turned out, she was right, but let’s back up a step or two. Veronica is one of my students at the Bedford Learning Center, a doggedly determined woman who is a few decades older than me and likes to pepper our conversations with bits of wisdom, usually about the differences between men and women. But that evening, she had turned away from gender problems in favor of the flora of her homeland, St. Lucia. A friend visiting from the island had just brought her a new supply of herbal tea-fixings, including the bark of the native cinnamon tree.

“You will see,” she said, and I did, because at our next meeting, she brought me a big Ziploc bag of leaves and nuts and the bark of what looked like a very large tree. In fact, it looked like someone had hacked off a chunk of a sizable oak tree or something and dyed it a more reddish color. It definitely did not look like what passes for cinnamon at any grocery store in America. Continue reading →