Red, Red Robin: A Commie in the Cabbage Patch

     My newspaper would probably deny this, and perhaps I'm being too sensitive; but I have found it to be true that the only letters-to-the-editor about your narrator that make it into print are the ones pointing out errors I've made.  I know there actually have been over the years a few "We Like BLA" letters, because the staff used to forward them to me for my private delectation.  (They don't anymore.)

     The letter that this column was written in response to was a funny combination of praise and condemnation.  It said something like:  Bob sure is funny, too bad she's a Commie.  So naturally the Sentinel printed it!

     I'm not going to go into the gradations of politics where I live, but trust me, out here you are not so much left, right or center as right, further right, or out there circlin' Jupiter.  It's why I don't talk politics!  I talk gardening!  But I guess I just don't look like a Republican and that's what the letter-writer was talking about.

     Anyway, I seized gleefully on the occasion to explain about the endnotes to the column, the bit about playing quietly in the dirt.  I lifted it from a guy named Voltaire and it encapsulated what I was trying to do politically when I first starting writing Bob, which was:  stay out of politics.

    And in any case, it gave me a chance to tell the fesse story.  I love the fesse story! 

A COMMIE IN THE CABBAGE PATCH:  BOB’S LITTLE MANIFESTO

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Choosing vegetables for one’s garden in the winter months provides the gardener a pleasurable and fat-free way to pass the long hibernal evenings, the opportunity to plan for maximum nutrition and efficiency, and the leisure to root out any potentially subversive influences that might transform the innocent seedbed into a hotbed of un-American activity.

            As I flipped through the Stokes catalog this morning, a patriotic smile curved my lips as I added to my list:  Corn.  America is built on corn.  Everything from breakfast cereal to face powder is made of corn in our mighty nation.  Words like “sweet,” “robust” and “traditional” are used in the ad copy. 

But as my eyes drifted through the glossy pictures, a worried frown creased my brow.  What was this variety, “Strawberry Popcorn?”  Oh, popcorn is all very well.  What could be more American than shoveling the fluffy salted puffs into one’s maw while sprawled on the carpet on a Saturday night, watching an old John Wayne movie?  But Strawberry?

Not to mince words, my dear, it was as red as Chairman Mao.

Give me vegetables that are green, I thought, the color of spring and U.S. dollars.  Green beans, spinach, bell peppers.  I paused, racked by a nagging doubt.  Peppers turn red when mature.  Well, lettuce then.  Lettuce is reliably green.

But wait a minute:  Is green not the color of the foam-mouthed environmentalist crazies who are destroying the very foundations of American life, according to the a.m. pundits?  Good lord, what vegetable was safe?

Cauliflower, I supposed; white is associated with purity.  But also with anemia, and pus.  I have never been attracted to the big pale globes like bumpy bleached brains.

Flipping disconsolately, I found myself on the beet page.  A sea of scarlet!  I was flooded by visions of Bolsheviks brandishing their spoons menacingly above bowls of blood-red borscht as they chanted, “We will bury you.”

I fainted.

All right.  I’m joking.  Historically, flowers may have stood for one movement or another but vegetables do not generally get into anything more political than, say, soup.  My point is, neither does your narrator.

I am reacting, with gentle hurt sarcasm, to a letter from a reader, published in the Sentinel last week, that, though praising Bob’s Little Acre, made reference to its narrator’s leftist leanings.

Let me make it clear that I am tickled pink by any mail at all, and that life has so humbled me that I am used to any compliments aimed in my direction being of the for-a-fat-girl-you-don’t-sweat-much variety.  My favorite was from another reader who observed how fortunate it was that I was such a failure as to write for a small newspaper, that I might be enjoyed locally.

And to be fair, the accusation of political bias was leveled not at my horticultural maunderings but my news coverage.  But this I find equally perplexing.  How much leftist propaganda can feasibly be worked into a story about new hours for the county dump?  Within the context of local politics, leaning left, right or center usually means you have fallen asleep, and are fixin’ to fall out of your chair.

I think if I have an agenda at all, it comes from Voltaire’s masterpiece, Candide, which I read in 10^th-grade French class.

In the story, the young Candide and his friends set out in the world with a certain ism – in this case, optimism, the view that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.  But immediately they are caught up in a series of catastrophes including plagues, wars, shipwrecks, the great earthquake of Lisbon and auto da fe hangings.

One character is an old lady who was once a beautiful princess (before being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, of course).  When the other characters ask her to sit down and tell her story, she replies, “I will sit, but only on one fesse.”

In French, a fesse is the half of one’s derriere on one side or the other of its great dividing line.  It is just like the French to have a word for this.  It is just like the English not to.

But the old lady’s recounting of her tale is interrupted by the latest disaster.  “Quick!” say the others.  “We must escape.  Can you ride a horse?”

“Yes,” she replies, “though only on one fesse.”

As they trot away, she finishes telling her adventures, one of which involves being holed up with an army surrounded by Cossacks.  During the long winter siege, cannibalism provided the only nourishment, and her left fesse became dinner for the troops.

After many more such vicissitudes, the characters find themselves content to take shelter from the great conflicts of the world on a little farm where they grow vegetables.  The secret of life, they discover, is to abandon isms and to cultivate one’s own garden.

I took the phrase for my own.  Personally, I translate it:  “to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.”   

And it is my only agenda, whether rolling in the dirt or dishing it out.  Yes, I’m a little green – we gardeners can’t help it, it starts in the thumb and works its way up.  But red?  I may have borrowed Che’s cigar once or twice (though usually only as an afterthought, when I needed his machinegun), but I do not shelter from the sun under a little green hat with a star on it.  I prefer the Aunt Loweezy style of chapeau, thank you, with roses and grapes and a pinecone spray-painted gold. 

Well, I’ll get back to it, shall I?  Gardening-wise, I will continue to tell fantastically boring stories about tomatoes and my brother Frank; news-wise, what I try for is complete sentences, and keeping the reader awake.

And if, in either capacity, I seem to lean left or right, please be assured it’s nothing more significant than a temporary imbalance caused by one missing fesse.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.



I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself In Dirt

          This is one I wrote a couple of years ago, just when I was beginning to make a sort of religion of dirt and, coincidentally, the first year my brother Frank started getting into gardening at all.  I was regrettably dismissive of his maiden efforts; but in fact he took to it with a convert’s zeal and grew some mighty tomatoes, naming each of his plants and ministering to their needs like Clara Barton.  One type he grew was the heirloom Black Krim, and I saved the seeds of one he gave me and from that had a plant in my next year’s garden, which I expect made it doubly an heirloom.  I named the plant Frank and used to go down to the garden and insult it in the afternoons when I got bored writing.      

I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself in Dirt

By Robin Ford Wallace

“What is the grass?”

Yes, Dear Reader, we are quoting Walt Whitman today.  We cannot mow our lawn without thinking of “Leaves of Grass,” in which Walt purports to be present in every blade, a concept that makes us pause behind our Troy-Bilt from time to time, examining the bottoms of our shoes contemplatively.

“Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he wrote and frankly, we do no such thing.  In summer our little acre is a jungle and to survive we go into commando mode. Put us behind the mower and we commence to cuss, drink beer and burn villages.   It is the way of the world, and not our fault.  This ain’t our war.

But grass is our enemy, and as we sweat and spit and ravage the countryside, we wonder why, in celebrating the wonder of life, dear Walt chose to stop at lawn level and not go that essential step deeper, asking:

What is the dirt?

As the reader may intuit, we dislike grass, whereas we have doted on dirt since our mud pie days and continue in our maturity to wallow in it happily, finding in dirt our milieu both as gardener and journalist.

But dirt gets little respect from others.   Consider the language:  Unscrupulous behavior is referred to as “playing dirty,” and if you engage in it you will “soil” your reputation, causing people to say that you have “feet of clay.”  Dirt, with water, is the base of the food chain and thus feeds the planet, but do people appreciate it?  No!  They “treat it like dirt.” 

How did this come about?  Perhaps it is because there is so much of it.  It is “as common as dirt.” 

Or perhaps it is the fact that ours is a nation that wishes to forget its agricultural past.  To the pavement-treading urbanite, dirt is something that the despised older generation with its baggy clothes and bad grammar slouched toothlessly around in, on equal terms with the hogs.   

But the supreme irony is that when such people become interested in the now trendy subject of organic gardening, they go out and spend serious money on sacks of – guess what?  The stuff that comes from the store must be this miraculous substance they’ve read so much about, whereas the stuff they wipe off their Guccis is just dirt.

And when we say “such people,” we are, of course, referring to our brother Frank.  This spring, Frank for the first time was bitten by the gardening bug.  Knowing nothing about gardening, and quite a lot about building upscale hotels, Frank began his maiden voyage into horticulture by constructing a luxury condo for his plants in the back yard of his primary girlfriend’s house. 

The gleaming wooden structure that contained Frank’s tiny raised bed, with a bottom to prevent weeds, tall sides to retard erosion and a top beam to support hanging baskets, bore glowing witness to his carpentry skills; though the precisely ruled nine inches he had allowed between tomato plants was equally eloquent testimony to a somewhat less perfect grasp of agriculture.  And of course Frank then spent $300 to fill his Tomato Hilton with store-bought soil. 

When we suggested, gently, that Frank’s tomatoes might fare better out in the yard, with more room between them, he was incredulous.  The yard was “just dirt.”

“Just dirt” indeed!  Dirt is an amazing substance.  It takes thousands of years to make dirt when conditions are perfect, and in some places it never forms at all.

Dirt starts when wind and water slowly, slowly chip away at rock, breaking it down into smaller particles.  That is the beginning, but before dirt can support life, air has to mix minerals into it, plants and animals have to decay in it, and worms have to digest it for generations. 

Then dirt starts moving around.  Dirt is always on the go.  If it is carried by water and deposited somewhere, it is called alluvium; if by a glacier, till; if by wind, loess

There are lots of different textures of dirt, with sand one of the coarser and clay one of the finer.  In our area we have a lot of clay, and it is true that clay is not a perfect dirt.  Its tiny particles bind together tightly, preventing air from reaching plant roots, and making for dense clods when wet and a hoe-breaking hardness when dry. 

But you go into gardening with the dirt you’ve got, and in any case, as has been said about other things, when dirt is good it’s fantastic and when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.  Clay has plenty of nutrients, and mixing in rotting organic material, called humus in dirt lingo, not only adds more but also corrects the gloppy texture. 

So you don’t need plant food, you don’t need $300, and you certainly don’t need a Tomato Hilton.  Because of the miracle of dirt, if you have raw red clay, and a thick layer of spoiled hay, you have pretty much all you need to grow anything you like.

Unlike poor Frank.  Frank’s primary girlfriend found out about his secondary and tertiary girlfriends, so baldly this time as to compromise her willing suspension of disbelief beyond even Frank’s prodigious fiction skills, and she tossed him out, thus separating him from his pretty garden.

But don’t mourn for him, Gentle Reader.  The tomatoes were planted too closely to come to anything, and the romantic upheaval is something that happens to Frank at least once a year, reliably supplying the family with conversational fodder for Thanksgiving.

It  is what we treasure about him.  As mentioned above, there is nothing we celebrate as much as:

Dirt.

END

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Plenty of Time: On the Occasion of My (Never Mind Which One) Birthday

            I’m posting this because I accidentally unearthed and reread it, and for some reason it cheered me up.  I wrote it because I’d had a birthday and was feeling really old; but see, now it’s four years later so I’m even –

            Well, on second thought, never mind.

August 2006:  An Essay On the Occasion of My (**)th Birthday

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It’s August, and at Bob’s Little Acre things look grim.

            Borers got the squash, weeds got the beets and I’m not sure what happened to the cucumbers.  Rain knocked the phlox border down and drought kept it from getting back up. 

Global warming decimated the impatiens and the dahlias were done in by Hurricane Rosie, AKA Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who bounces up and down on them like Hugh Hefner on a waterbed. 

Japanese beetles made a skeleton of the plum tree and marched on to the roses, raping and pillaging with buggy abandon until I went berserk with the secateurs and took out their food supply.  Now they don’t have any roses but neither do I.

In addition to the insects and the heat wave, this August has brought me a birthday that can be named only by euphemism.  I don’t like calling myself “a woman of a certain age” but I think saying the actual number would give me a stroke. 

Another euphemism for the age I’ve gotten to be is “mature” but I don’t think anybody would buy that one in my case.  It may describe my thighs but it’s way off base as regards my financial status or personality.

My savings account is a sickly child that is constantly bullied by its greedy brother, the checking account, which beats it up and steals its money every month when the mortgage comes due. 

And as for my personality, it never made it out of junior high school.  It sits in the mud messily eating chocolate, and cries if anyone points out that it is fat.  It’s afraid of snakes, tractor-trailer trucks, garbage cans, basements and the doctor.  It thinks orzo looks like maggots and mayonnaise looks like snot. 

Once, trying to appear sophisticated because it was in France, it ate an anchovy hors d’oeuvre, and forever afterward it vomits at the memory because as far as it is concerned the thing looked just like an olive being subsumed by a slug.

It has been cooking on electric and gas ranges for thirty years, but sometimes in department stores it lingers in the toy section, sick with desire for an Easy-Bake oven.

Anyway, though I may deny to the death that I am mature, there is now hard evidence that I am old, and I was looking forward to this birthday with the enthusiasm usually reserved for bird flu.

So August finds the garden looking like Sherman just marched through and midlife finds the gardener as complete and utter a train wreck as she was at 12, only fatter and deeper in debt.  I never accomplished any of the big goals I set when I was young.  I never developed self-confidence, an investment strategy, or breasts.  I never even got an Easy-Bake Oven.

So.  Am I depressed? 

Nah.  Whether from arrested development or incipient senility, I’m still as wildly unrealistic as ever, and I figure I can still pull my garden and my life out of the fire.

Take the beet patch, for example.  It had grown up with weeds the size of Michael Jordan and I didn’t know how to reclaim it.  Then, at my birthday party, an underemployed engineer turned our Everest-like front yard into a water park, using plastic sheeting and the garden hose to rig up a slip-n-slide.

The idea was, you sat or flopped belly-down on the plastic, then the water and the gravity sent you speeding helplessly down the hill, finally landing at the bottom as if you’d been shot from a canon.  It amused the guests, and personally I found shooting down the hill coated with grass clippings a more effective way to deny my age than buying embarrassing clothes or having an affair with a lifeguard.

But the slip-n-slide also had a horticultural use.  It dumped guests straight into my beet patch, and there is nothing like human bodies rolling at high speeds to kill weeds.  Now all I have to do is till and plant, and I can still pull off a fine crop of late peas.

As for my life, there’s a sort of peace in accepting that some ambitions will never be realized.  One Christmas my husband gave me a guitar, thus providing me with ten years of angst as I made and broke promises with myself to learn to play it. 

When I finally signed up for lessons, the teacher explained to me I had stored the guitar improperly and it had warped into uselessness.  I was overcome with shame – and relief.  I can’t read music, I have no ear, and it’s not like I don’t have anything else to do.

With a little creative thinking, I am able to let go of my dreams of financial security with similar ease.  My love for the outdoors and a lifetime of camping have, after all, made me uniquely suited for living under a bridge.

As for professional success and personal fulfillment, they might still be out there somewhere, right? 

Recently my husband was warning our young friend, a chicken of 30, not to waste her life procrastinating as he had.  “If you want to accomplish anything,” he lectured, “the time to do it is right now.”

“Yeah, well, could I start next week?” she said.  “We just got Direct TV.”

I feel just the same.  I know I ought to be winning the Booker Prize or discovering a cure for cancer, but I have to plant those peas and anyway it’s Sunday.

Do you think it’s too late for peas?  I don’t.  This is the South for one thing and there’s global warming for another, and above all there is denial.  At my unthinkable age I may not have developed an impressive stock portfolio or bustline but by God I have built up my self-deception skills until I could deny for America at the Olympics.

So yeah, I figure I’ve got plenty of time.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Resolution For 2011: The Purse Theory of the Universe

Resolution For 2011:  How I Hope to Heal Galactic Disharmony and Locate My Car Keys

By Robin Ford Wallace

My sister Laura has a theory that if you find the perfect purse, the rest of  your life will fall into order behind it.  Of course, it’s purely hypothetical because no one has ever done it.

If you have a small purse, you find yourself in denial about it, trying to cram in things like books and pizzas.  If you have a big one, you can fit all those necessities in there but with the caveat you’ll never see them again.  And if you get one with six zillion separate compartments cleverly cordoned off with flaps and zippers and outside pouches, you will almost certainly end up slobbering mad on a rooftop with an Uzi, firing into an innocent crowd while you shriek, “Where – are – my – Breathsavers?”

But why are we talking about purses in this, a feature that usually maintains a least a thin veneer of horticulture?

One word:  January.   January is not a month that offers much by way of horticulture, but it is one that traditionally affords humanity an opportunity for self-improvement as it slouches into the new year appalled by what a loser it’s been in the old one.  For my resolution this year, I thought I’d try the purse theory.    

Some people don’t believe in these self-improvement resolutions.  That’s fine for them, but as for those of us whose personality is best described not as Type A or Type B but Type TW (“Train Wreck”), we have to believe.  It is our only hope! 

It’s not just that we have a million faults.  It’s also that we’re so aware of them, our insecurity is fault no. 1,000,001.  Here, for example, is an actual conversation one of us, to name no names, had with her husband after hosting a dinner:

HER:  Honey?  Do you think I’m an OK cook?

HIM (drowsily):  You’re an excellent cook.  Everything was delicious.

HER:  Well.  Thanks.  But my writing –

HIM:  There’s nothing wrong with your writing.  Go to sleep.

(Pause.)

HER:  What about my hair?

Disgusted, he left her for a Waffle House waitress. 

Not really, but you see the problem:  For those of us with low-to-no self-esteem, if we don’t have at least the hope of improvement we don’t know how much longer we can stand us.

Besides, though I admit each year’s diet and budget may leave me just as fat and poor by Christmas as I was the year before, there really are some resolutions I have kept.  In 2009, I kept one to stop smoking, and in 2010 (squeaking by in month 12 by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin) I kept another, overcoming my Internet ignorance enough to plunge boldly into cyberspace.  Bob’s Little Acre is now a blog you may read at www.bobslittleacre.blogspot.com.

Now, for 2011, it seems logical to give the purse theory a try because my handbag has always seemed such an apt metaphor for my life.  Which is to say:  a train wreck.

I’m the large purse type, myself.  I’m always saying in this space that things don’t matter, things are nothing, and I really believe that.  Nonetheless, insofar as I own things, I don’t leave home without them.

My purse must house the accoutrements of my trade – notebook, voice recorder, camera – as well as books and crosswords to keep me company at lunch, in case my car breaks down, or in the event I’m thrown in jail. 

Then there are cosmetics.  A girl has to have lipstick, not so much from vanity as from the fact a girl’s lips start drying out once a girl hits menopause or so.  And the mirror compact is not for primping but to check whether, as indicated from the looks I get from interviewees sometimes, I really have a booger hanging from my nose, or have recently turned into a cockroach.

As for the rest of it – well, heck, you never know when you’re going to need a corkscrew, or want to toss a salad.  It may seem like a lot to carry around, but when someone needs something out of the ordinary like a jump rope or a shoehorn, we big-purse types can look smug, pick up our bag and –

Claw helplessly through it until we are reduced to tears.  We can never find anything in those murky depths!  Objects in a big purse do not obey ordinary laws of physics.  They move through time rather than space – there, not there, then there again with no intervening human agency. 

Purse contents not only move mysteriously through the fabric of reality, sometimes they even multiply.  This happened once with my favorite pen.  I liked it so much I always kept mining in there until I found it.  Then one day my hand came out of the dark miasma clasping two of them.  It was a shocker, like learning you are married to twins.        

            Of course, the duplicate pen soon returned to its alternate universe, and so did the original eventually, never to return.  It’s when that happens, says Laura, that action is required.  “When your space-time continuum goes south,” she says, “it’s time for a new purse.”

            It’s time for a new purse.  Maybe this time it really will be the perfect one, and then, who knows?  Maybe Laura’s theory will work.  Maybe I’ll stop fumbling frenziedly for my cell phone until a ringing from my butt alerts me it’s in my back pocket.  And maybe from there I’ll become calm and organized and quietly self-confident. 

And maybe from there reality will continue to reshape itself until the clashing universes achieve harmony.  Maybe all the people of the world will live together in peace and love each other like brothers.

Now.  What about my hair?      

END

           Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

A Garden is Like a River

 

                         

All right.  I decided to post this one not because of its shining brilliance but because my husband dug me up a picture of the River O’ Petunias and I’ve been gloating over it during this interminable blizzard like a lifer over a Hustler mag.

The photo shows the River O’ in perhaps its second year, not its most spectacular, which was certainly the first, when I wrote this Bob’s Little Acre about it.  Like the man says, you can’t step in the same River O’ twice.

A GARDEN IS LIKE A RIVER.  SORT OF.

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Old joke:  A wise man says to his disciple, “Life is like a river.”

            “Life is like a river,” the disciple, deeply impressed, tells a second disciple, and the second disciple passes the wisdom on to a third, who passes it to a fourth, and so on until perhaps the twentieth disciple asks the nineteenth.  “Wait a minute.  How is life like a river?”

            “I don’t know,” admits the nineteenth, and asks the eighteenth, who asks the seventeenth, and so on until the question makes its way back to the wise man.

            Who shrugs.  “So,” he says.  “Maybe life isn’t like a river.”

            Still, people are always comparing life to one thing or another, and bodies of water and horticulture figure prominently.  I can’t count the times I’ve read, “The river of life,” or “Life is like a garden.” 

Nowhere, however, have I read, “A garden is like a river,” so I’m not altogether sure where I got the idea for the mighty Petunia River that now dominates my front yard and life.  All I know is:  This thing is bigger than I am. 

I don’t say that merely because it takes two garden hoses to water it.  What I mean is, I think it’s Art.

The Petunia River is to the ordinary flowerbed what the Pyramids are to the Quonset hut.  It is Everest.  It is the Sistine Chapel.  It is an epic, cast-of-thousands Cecil B. De Mille flood in living color that meanders, cascades and undulates down the length of this little acre, finally to empty into a plunge basin of impatiens around a willow tree at the bottom of the hill. 

It is my chef d’oeuvre, my opus.  It is the crowning achievement of a life spent rolling in the dirt. 

It is also the reason for the weeds in the pea patch and the fact that the squash swells to the size of your average Wal-Mart shopper before I get around to picking it.  What is food next to Art? 

The idea of the River might have sprung from the variety of petunia I planted, Wave, a name that suggests aquatic motion.  Or it may have its genesis in the geography of this place, which is so vertical that things are always losing their moorings and rolling merrily down toward the road, including topsoil, mulch, beer cans, and, more than once, your narrator.

Or I may just be barking mad.

People tell me I am and I used to worry about it, but it has long since ceased to bother me.  In my experience, when people tell you you’re crazy it usually just means you’re driving them that way, which is regrettable but hardly the same thing.

            Besides, if you read the news you’ll notice that people who really are nuts never suspect a thing.  They just go on their way rejoicing, believing that it is perfectly normal to communicate by letter bomb or keep UPS deliverymen cut up and parceled out in freezer bags.  So worrying about your sanity is a pretty good sign that you’re sane, or so I tell myself as I twitch and slobber.

            But I will admit the River represents a possibly psychotic departure from my usual gardening style.  I’m not big on design.  Like everyone else, I admire the glossy pictures in gardening mags, but always with a certain contemptuous realism  -- nice, but it ain’t gonna happen here, I work. 

I’m more the slash-and-burn type.  I don’t plant flowers in the place they’d look best, I plant them in a bare spot left where the dog’s wading pool has killed the grass.

I do, though, have a thing about rivers.

Throughout time (which Thomas Wolfe compared to a river), poems, novels and silly testosterone-laden movies about fishing have attested to the magic and mystery of rivers.  From the Styx to the Jordan, they figure in the world’s religions, and from the Nile to the Rubicon they figure in the world’s history.  Songs have been sung about them by everyone from Homer to Otis Redding.  Rivers are important to our culture.

Some of the best times of my life have been at rivers, though I don’t mind admitting they involved less of culture than of beer and inner tubes.  Still, isn’t there a kind of poetry in happy memories, whether or not you were drunk at the time?

In any case, I feel a certain mystic reverence for rivers and am always stunned by their beauty.  So perhaps that’s why the one Grand Design of my gardening life has been the Petunia River. 

I don’t think so, though.  I think I just looked at the hill and saw a mighty confluence of pink and purply blue petunias rolling organically down its slope, precisely as Michelangelo looked at a slab of marble and saw his David prance nakedly forth. I can’t explain it any better than that.  To understand the process, you’d have to be a great artist like Michelangelo and me.

Just joking.  This has been my only brush with Art and it is seriously starting to get on my nerves.  My lettuce bolted before I even noticed it was ready to pick, and as my husband points out we can’t eat petunias.

Still, I’m not unhappy I did it.  Yard work has so commandeered my life that if somebody asked me what I’d been doing for the last 30 years I’d have to admit, “Mostly mowing grass.”  Now I can anyway say, “What?  You never heard of the Petunia River?”

Well, I will stop trying to explain Art.  You either get it or you don’t.  I will merely shrug, look wise, and say:

“So.  Why shouldn’t a garden be like a river?”

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Sharecropper

This is another Bob from way back, when I was still flailing around deciding what I wanted to do in the space.  I suppose I still am.  But back then I was doing it, you know, worse. 

Sometimes, especially in the beginning (as you’ll see if you read down to the next entry), Bob’s Little Acre was – take a deep breath – actually trying to impart useful horticultural information.  Latterly, with the economy collapsing and Americans waddling around consuming equal amounts of Fritos and insulin, BLA puffed out its chest and started giving some lip to the consumer ethos and Big Food.

But more typically, Bob would just give up and tell long, fantastically boring stories about beer, life and  its brother Frank.  This is a story column, but it did anyway make a feeble effort to relate to horticulture.

SHARECROPPER

By Robin Ford Wallace

Sharecropper.

            The word makes you think of a thin, miserable man who lives in a tumbledown shack on an estate owned by a rich man with a big belly and a cruel laugh.  The thin man toils and the fat man reaps the benefit of his labor.

            I have never been, precisely, thin; yet, for one summer I was certainly a sharecropper.

            It happened like this.  I was young and newly married and I lived in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood.  Our yard was so tiny that it would fit into your downstairs bathroom, but I used every square inch.  I had petunia borders along the sidewalk, and on the side of the house I had a postage stamp garden precisely big enough for four tomato plants and two peppers.

            Across the street, in a house divided into apartments, dwelled my friend Mary Hart.  Mary Hart had a degree in the agricultural sciences and the story of how she came to live in downtown Atlanta, which we don’t have time for here, would make a good country song because it involves wind whistlin’ over lonely prairies and good lovin’ gone bad.  Anyway, she had her own postage stamp garden but she was jealous of mine.  Once I came home to find shovel holes in my plot.  It turned out Mary Hart thought my dirt was better than hers and had decided to take it by force.

            So there we were, two frustrated farmers going crazy with our itty-bitty gardens to the point of stealing each other’s dirt.  I remember we were constantly putting things in Mason jars that had no business to be there, and using the word “harvest” to mean “these three tomatoes.”  Something had to be done.

            It was Mary Hart who found the ad in one of those government farm publications.   The ad had been placed by a sweet couple in their 80s who lived on what had been one of the last dairy farms in the Atlanta city limits.  Now the husband was dying of cancer and the wife was taking care of him, but they missed having fresh vegetables in the summer.  The deal was, they would supply the land, we would come after work and garden, and we would share the vegetables.  We shook on it and were happy, except for two things.

            Thing one was the garden plot.  It was as big as five or six football fields, and there were no trees around to shed leaves for mulch.  It was just a huge red dry patch baking in the sun, and it might have been manageable with, say, a tractor and a crew of migrant workers.  We had hoes.

            Thing two was something that you would never imagine a couple in their 80s would inflict on two young, female sharecroppers:  a teenage son.

            Jimmy was not really a teenager, of course; he was 65 if he was a day.  But he was one of those boys who marry early and often and ricochet home to Mama after each divorce.  So as we tackled the Dust Bowl with our little hoes, Jimmy was always underfoot, trying to boss us around and look down our fronts. 

Why, might one ask, had the elderly couple not just asked their live-in son if they wanted a garden?  For the same reason the parents of real teenagers have to hire landscaping services to mow their lawns.  Teenagers are worthless. 

            Worthless as he was, Jimmy had plenty of opinions.  Once we managed to get a load of horse manure from a riding stable, and Jimmy explained to us why it was useless.  When weeds were choking out our crops, Jimmy would explain it was too wet to work the land.   When we planted tomatoes, he would explain why they were the wrong variety.

            As we worked, he would crouch beside us, smoking cigarettes and talking endlessly.  One story was about how one of his ex-wives had died on I-285 when hit by a semi.  “They found a little piece of her in the left-hand lane and a little piece of her in the center lane and a little piece of her northbound, and then southbound …”   Do you know how many lanes I-285 has?

            We usually let him drone on, but I do remember once saying, when we were planting peppers, “No, Jimmy, we do not want to know why they call them Peter peppers.”

            Jimmy never helped us with anything else but he was intensely interested in our cornfield and he did participate in that.  I remember particularly the planting process.  Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows dropping seed corn as we went.  Jimmy followed behind us, solemnly covering the kernels with fertilizer.  I thought then, if I think too hard about this it will turn into a symbol and I’ll vomit.

            Jimmy always called the corn “our corn” or “Mama and Diddy’s corn.”  But then he would call us at home and say, “Get over here quick!  The squirrels is eating your corn!”

             When we finally harvested, though, it turned back into his corn.  He actually accused us of taking more than our share.  It was finally more than we could bear and we did the worst thing we could think of:  We told his mother.

            Well, this has somehow turned into a story about what a jerk Jimmy was, but it wasn’t really a case of oppressive landowners.  Jimmy we could ignore, and the parents were lovely.  What really oppressed us was that huge, unmanageable field.  I remember “weeding” once with a lawnmower.  Even the harvest overwhelmed us.  We had plenty of stuff to put in Mason jars, but often by the time we got time to do it, the produce would be crawling with maggots.

            So we reached the end of our summer of sharecropping and never looked back.  Mary Hart got married and began raising children, not corn.  We never saw Mama and Diddy again, but I hope if they wanted a garden the next year, they hired migrant workers and kept old Jimmy out of their hair.

            As for me, I moved to the country where I still garden happily, and if anybody offers me helpful opinions on how to do it I chase them away with my hoe.  It is the great advantage of having one’s own little acre.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Truth, Justice and Chocolate Chip Cookies: Part 1

            Once I was shopping at the Bi-Lo in Trenton, Ga., when I was assaulted by the odor of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies.  Green light began shooting from my eyes, and slobber dripped from my newly emergent fangs.  Helplessly, I was drawn by the aroma as a moth to flame, and I made my way over to the bakery counter trampling fellow shoppers and overturning display counters in my haste.

            “May I buy just one of those chocolate chip cookies?” I asked the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter.

            “No, hon, I’m not allowed to sell you one cookie,” she said.  “So I reckon I’ll just have to give it to you.”

            It was the kind of moment a fat girl remembers for the rest of her life.  The cookie was perfect, the chocolate chips still liquid, and furthermore it was washed down with the milk of human kindness.

            Now.  Fast-forward four or five years.  Bi-Lo had by then gotten in the habit of putting a dispenser of free cookies on that same bakery counter, which ruined my diet some days and some days did not.  I am helpless before melty chocolate but cold and superior when confronted by those flinty sugar cookies with multicolored sprinkles.  But whether I ate one or not, the cookies made me feel warm and loved, reminding me of my summum bonum cookie moment.

            Then, one terrible day, a sign sprang up beside the cookie jar:  “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”

            I was embittered.  If nothing spells lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven, I had to face the grim reality that Bi-Lo no longer loved me.  I was too OLD.  Geriatrics like me were good enough to write checks at the register, but could we have a cookie?  No!  Cookies were for the young and cute.

            And that, Gentle Reader, is how I became a crusading journalist.  It became an obsession with me to get that sign taken down, and that’s why I veered off the garden path in Bob’s Little Acre to detour down the cookie aisle.  One column didn’t do it, so a couple of weeks later I had another shot.  Here they are, in order.

            Alas!  Bi-Lo never reversed its ageist cookie policy.  It just started putting the cookies somewhere safe, under the more cheerful message:  “Kids!  Ask our friendly bakers for a free cookie!”

            So I lost, but at least they took down the obnoxious sign, huh?  I really was on the verge of writing column no. 3 under the screaming headline:

           
TEAR DOWN THIS SIGN, MR. COOKIE CHEF!  

Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Some Peripheral Comments on Cookies)

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Do you know how to get rid of a tapeworm?  You can do it in just three days.

            On day one, eat a nice dinner, balanced, plenty of vegetables; and then eat a cookie for dessert.

            On day two, eat another nutritious, home-cooked meal; and then have a delicious cookie to finish up.

            On day three, have yourself yet another cozy little supper, only this time:  No cookie.  When the tapeworm pops his head out of your mouth to demand, “WHERE’S MY COOKIE?” you grab him and pull him out hand over hand.

            But this is not a column about tapeworms.  I just thought a little joke would be a pleasant way to lead into this week’s subject, which is:

            Why You Should Grow A Garden.

            A lot of times when people say “you” what they really mean is “I.”  They say, “You know how great you feel when your hard work at last pays off and you’re finally awarded that promotion, or the Nobel Prize?”  When of course you have no idea how that feels!  Nothing like that ever happens to you; you are in fact lying in a ditch sullenly drinking whiskey and taking boozily inaccurate potshots at the repo men who are carrying off your washing machine.

            Well, for heaven’s sake, there I go, doing it myself! 

But when I say “why you should grow a garden,” I really do mean you.  There’s no question about me.  When the year turns to spring and gentle breezes carry floral perfumes to my hungrily snuffling nostrils, I can no more resist the siren call of dirt than you could walk by a plate of free cookies at the grocery store without reaching out and –

All right.  So this time maybe I do mean me when I say “you.”  For all I know you could walk right past that plate of cookies as flintily indifferent as one of those white-lipped medieval saints carved from cold and unfeeling marble, your hands folded primly on your grocery cart, your eyes trained dead ahead at the lettuce leaves in the produce section, your sanctimonious little brain thinking primly about something you recently read in the Bible. 

Aren’t you special?

Anyway, I’ll try to stop mixing me up with you, but I’m warning you right now that we’ll never get through with this gardening column if you can’t stop obsessing about chocolate chip cookies.  So let’s not say one more word about right-from-the-oven cookies so hot that the chocolate chips are an oozing glossy-brown liquid that sticks to your fingers and melts on your tongue like –

 Well.  This is not a column about cookies.  The reason you should grow a garden is:  it’s time to declare war on grocery stores.  

Why?  It’s a matter of maintaining the integrity of the food supply.  The outside aisles of a grocery store contain real food:  the dairy section has milk, cheese and butter; the meat counter, beef, fish, pork and chicken; the produce aisle,  fresh fruits and vegetables; the bakery counter, bread and just-baked chocolate chip –

Ahem.  But that’s just the outside.  The interior of the grocery store is a vast wasteland of chemical-packed, ultra-processed, dehydrated, reconstituted, ascorbic-acid-added-to-retain-color, boxed, canned and plastic-wrapped corn and soy byproducts that don’t even look like food. 

I was reading a newspaper article the other day about the new scientifically engineered cheeseburger Dorito.  Teams of scientists have worked tirelessly to time-release the flavors so that you don’t taste the onion until a second or two after the pickle hits your tongue. 

Gentle Reader, THAT’S – NOT – FOOD!  That’s chemistry!      

            All right already (you might reply impatiently)!  Everyone by now knows processed food is bad for you but nobody forces anybody to eat it!  

Anyway (you might add accusingly), who are you to rant about Doritos when you can’t seem to write a full paragraph without mentioning chocolate chip cookies? 

Also (you might conclude relentlessly), you can’t declare war on grocery stores!  Didn’t you write in this very space in October 2007:    

“I love the grocery store.  Every summer I threaten to move in.  Their air conditioning is better than mine, there’s food all around, and sometimes they give you cookies.”

            All right!  I confess! 

This is, too, a column about cookies.

            To wit:  A grocery store in town used to have a plate of cookies on offer at the bakery counter.  I tend to be always on a diet or off  it, so sometimes I’d take a cookie and sometimes I wouldn’t.  No big deal.

            But then the plate of cookies sprouted a sign:  “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”

            Which may have sounded OK to whoever thought of it – they’re providing a treat for tykes, right? – but every time I walked by it, it hurt my feelings again, because in my way-way-way-over-12 case it translated to: 

“DON’T TOUCH THESE COOKIES, LARDBUTT!”

            At first it just made me a little sniffy – “FYI,” I’d sniff, “very few children 12 and under have checkbooks and make the family’s food-buying decisions.”

Then I became morally indignant: “This is ageism!  I’ll sue!”

But taking it to court would make it sound like I really had a chip on my shoulder, and I didn’t think the judge would take me any more seriously because it happened to be chocolate. 

So instead, I began brooding malevolently, decided to declare war on grocery stores, and seem to have killed an entire garden column carrying on about it.

Well, it is spring, and time to roll in the dirt.  Next time I promise to be more on-task. 

But there’s such a thing as social justice, and sometimes even garden writers must put down the trowel and ask the hard questions, such as:

“WHERE’S MY COOKIE?”

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Practically No Mention of Cookies)

By Robin Ford Wallace

           

            This crusadin’ journalism biz gets to be a habit.  You get so used to exposing corruption and righting wrongs, you find yourself doing it while you brush your teeth.  Like the other day I got to delvin’ around and before I knew what hit me I had unearthed three bank frauds, two crooked politicians and a mistress in Argentina, when all I’d been looking for was some horseradish for my chicken sandwich..

            So it was that in the last Bob’s Little Acre I sat down to write an earnest little treatise on Why You Should Grow a Garden and instead found myself passionately protestin’ discriminatory cookie policies at the Bi-Lo.  So here I am back again to take another stab.  Here goes.

Why You Should Grow a Garden: 

            Last summer I overheard a man talking about what nice tomatoes you could buy at this time of year and I was stricken with pity.  Buy?  Tomatoes?  In the middle of summer, in the middle of the country?  I figured this was some poor slob nobody loved, not even his mother.

Then I started thinking about that – who would I get tomatoes from if I didn’t grow them myself?  I used to have a friend I’d trade off produce with, until one day she asked for something I didn’t want to give up.   So I said no, she took umbrage, then she took revenge.  Two years later I’m still reelin’ from the aftermath.

            So reason No. 1 to grow a garden is:  to avoid human contact.  It comes out cheaper in the long run to buy tomatoes than to fool around with friendship, but home-grown are better and anyway gardens are lovely places to be alone in.  If people do butt in it is the work of a moment to chase them away with your hoe, and persistent intruders, with only a bit more trouble, make excellent compost. 

            But seriously, the more important reason to grow a garden is:  to save America.

            A few weeks ago there was an article in the gardening section of our daily newspaper about Hispanic immigrants showing their neighbors how to grow food.  These hard-working Latinos didn’t spend a lot of money on bagged soil or chemical fertilizer, the writer marveled; they just worked the earth with their hand tools until it felt “ready.”

            Yes!  I thought.   Finally somebody who understood dirt.

            Then, the very next week, the very same gardening section of the very same newspaper ran an article on growing tomatoes.  All the advice was from a guy who ran a nursery in town, and his advice on tomato plants was: 

Buy them from me. 

            Far be it from Bob’s Little Acre to offer discouragin’ words to that gardening section as it struggles arduously upward toward elusive mediocrity, but what do you expect when, instead of charging your advertisers for space, you let them write your articles? 

Anyway, this was a nice nurseryman and as it happens I personally finance yachts for him every spring as I go barking mad in his wonderful garden center; so I could have forgiven everything except for his advice on the soil you need for growing tomatoes, which was:

            Buy it from me.

            Buy dirt?  Hadn’t anybody paid attention the week before, about working the earth until it was ready?  About gardeners being producers, not consumers? 

Excuse me.  I don’t mean to rant, but we’ve got a nation to save here.

            America is a lot of things – a beautiful idea, a noble experiment – but one thing it also is that we shouldn’t forget is:

            Dirt.

            Countries are made of the stuff.  The Irish affectionately call theirs “The Auld Sod,” and longtime readers of this space may remember my quoting Rupert Brooke’s beautiful, patriotic poem in my article on compost.  If he died fighting for his homeland, he wrote, some corner of a foreign field would “a richer dust conceal… that is forever England.”  Meaning, you see, Rupert, and I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened.  But what the poem points out is that England is made of dirt, and that Rupert is made of England. 

            Closer to home, another poetic image I have frothed on about through the years is the notion of Walt Whitman’s presence in blades of grass, a conceit that always makes me gaze pensively at the bottoms of my Reeboks as I sit sipping the post-mow adult beverage.  Dear Walt says “grass,” not “dirt,” but one assumes he got there through the root system.

Americans have come to think of dirt as coming in bags in just the same way they think of food coming in foil-wrapped geometrical squares you warm up in the toaster.  When in fact processed food is like those bundled financials that poisoned our economy; if there is anything real in there it is too balled up in toxins to do anybody much good. 

            What can we do about it?  Politicos carry on about getting back to “core values.”  Well, you don’t get any more core than dirt.  Real food comes from it, and gardening is all about rolling in it. 

Anyway, if America is dirt and we are America, are we really prepared to let the only people who understand dirt be immigrants whose right to be on it is argued bitterly in every election?

            So that is why you should grow a garden:  it is your patriotic duty.  I hope we’ve got that straight now.  But before we go:

I still want that cookie.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.