Ten of Pentacles

The Ten of Pentacles is family wealth: an old man in a patterned robe sitting under an archway with his dogs, a couple talking beside him, a child hiding behind its mother, a house with a tower beyond. The ten coins are laid out over the scene in the pattern of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. It's the card of inheritance, legacy, and the fortune that outlasts the people who made it.

Corn smut is a fungus of maize. It starts as single cells that bud like yeast and harm nothing. The trouble begins with a marriage. When two compatible cells meet on a corn plant, they fuse, and only then can the fungus infect. It grows into whatever part of the plant is growing fastest (often the ear) and turns it into galls. Where kernels should have been, silver-gray swellings appear, lumpy and soft, and eventually they fill up with billions of dark spores. It's also one of the great laboratory fungi, a model for how plant pathogens work.

Here's the joke that makes this the Ten. To most corn growers in the United States, a smut gall is a lost ear, a crop loss, something to breed away. In Mexico it's huitlacoche, a prized ingredient in quesadillas, soups, and tamales, eaten for generations and prized. Chefs have called it the Mexican truffle. The same gall in the same field is ruin or delicacy, depending on whose kitchen it's carried into.

So the Ten asks what you've inherited, and from whom. The opportunity is that every legacy can be reread. What your family called a disease may be what you learn to cook. The risk is to take for granted that the fortune you've been handed is what it looks like, or that the vault would still be yours if the corn had a say. Every inheritance is somebody's gall. Some of them are delicious.