By Jeff Eckenrode

It was late afternoon. A dull, gray light that was typical for the time of year made the shop feel dimmer and sleepier than it actually was.

A light, misty rain gently ticked against the shop windows while Berny was busy restocking. Suddenly, she stopped, held up a jar to the light just above her, and turned it slowly like she was appraising a gemstone.

"This one's really sticky," she said, her eyes wide with fascination. "Like, notably sticky!"

"Congratulations," I said, not looking up from the checklist on my clipboard.

"No, I mean, is that supposed to happen? It's basically clinging to the glass!"

I set the clipboard down, mostly because her tone had shifted from casual to genuinely curious, and Berny genuinely curious was a rabbit hole I'd learned to just walk into rather than try to resist.

"That's trichomes. Tiny resin glands all over the surface of the bud. Under a microscope they look like little mushrooms."

"Mushrooms?" Berny asked, raising her right eyebrow in curiosity.

"Mushrooms. They're where most of the good stuff lives, cannabinoids, terpenes, all of it. When they're intact and healthy, the resin they produce makes everything feel tacky."

Berny turned the jar again, squinting at it like she might spot one of the tiny mushrooms with her bare eyes if she just tried hard enough. "So sticky is a good thing?"

"Sticky's usually a good sign," I said. "It generally means the trichomes are still doing their job."

"Usually?" she repeated, catching the word the way she always caught the words I tried to slide past her.

"There's a difference between sticky and wet," I said. "Wet means moisture, and moisture means it wasn't cured properly, which means mold risk. Sticky is resin. Wet is a problem waiting to happen."

"So how do you tell them apart?" she said, crossing her arms and looking at me like she expected to hear something she wasn't going to believe.

"Wet clings and stays clingy. Sticky clings and then lets go."

I held out a hand, palm up, the way a surgeon waits for a scalpel. "Give it here."

She passed the jar over with the same solemnity. I opened it, pinched a small amount between two fingers, and held them up between us like I was about to reveal a magic trick.

"Behold," I said, with all the enthusiasm of someone reading a grocery list.

I pulled my fingers apart slowly. A thin thread of resin stretched between them, caught the last of the gray window light for a dramatic half-second, and snapped back to the bud, exactly the way it was supposed to.

"See? Cured right. Nothing to worry about."

I went to set the jar down and discovered, too late, that my other hand had drifted to the edge of the clipboard, which was now stuck to my palm by a resin smear I hadn't noticed acquiring.

I looked at the clipboard. The clipboard did not look back, being a clipboard, but it also did not let go.

"That's oddly satisfying," Berny said, watching me shake my hand with the specific dignity of someone pretending this was always the plan.

"It is a little," I admitted, prying the clipboard loose one finger at a time, which was as close as I generally got to enthusiasm about anything that wasn't a coin.

She took the jar back and held it up to the light again, this time just to watch it catch what little there was of it, gray and thin through the rain-streaked window. "It kind of looks like it's frosted."

"That's the trichomes too. Same reason." I gave up on the clipboard and set it down, sticky side up, a problem for future me. "You're allowed to just enjoy it now. You don't have to keep interrogating the bud."

"I like interrogating the bud."

"You like interrogating everything."

"Only the things worth interrogating," Berny said, and went back to restocking, humming to herself, entirely unbothered by having just lost that argument.

A Sticky Question