Ou Sont Les Neiges d'Antan? Snow. Humility. Freezer Bags

Ou Sont Les Neiges d’Antan?  A Winter’s Tale of Snow, Humility and Freezer Bags

By Robin Ford Wallace

            The beginning of January’s snowstorm found your narrator gazing with a beatific smile at the wintry landscape that lay white and unblemished beyond her window.  Her work completed, her house clean, her sole company the man she loved, she allowed a note of complacence to creep into her voice as she opined:

            “Ah, how peaceful!  What harm could we humans do each other if snow kept us always so quiet within our homes?”

            Several days later, as your narrator packed the man she loved into many small freezer bags to elude detection and, if necessary, to supplement the stores of food she had laid in during raids on the homes of newly deceased neighbors, she realized she had at least partially answered a question meant to be rhetorical. 

            OK.  Not really. 

Yes, I had a serious case of cabin fever but no, I didn’t kill anybody, though I must say it was touch and go for a few days there.  A week is a long time to be snowbound in the deep country with a man who owns a new drum.

Anyway, shortly after the storm I asked my sister Laura another rhetorical question:  “I wonder,” I said,  “how many marriages this dastardly blizzard has destroyed.”

            And she said:  “Eight.”

            See, Laura works for a divorce attorney and eight is the number of new cases that called in when the world had thawed enough to reopen the office.  That’s in one small Georgia town but if you multiplied it out across the Southeast you would probably find that that week of snow caused an exponential decrease in marital affection, an inverse spike in the income of divorce attorneys, and God only knows what kind of run on freezer bags.

            I say “week” but in my case it was rather longer.  Since we seem to be answering rhetorical questions today here’s another, from a famous old poem by the Frenchman Francois Villon:  “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

            (To which the man I love would reply:  “In my pants.”

            It’s his primary joke.  Virtually all questions can be answered “in my pants,” and it’s hysterically funny for the first couple of decades.  “All right, buster, where’s the fire?”  “Can you see anything?”  “Do you love me?”  Try some yourself, though I wouldn’t do it during a snowstorm.)

            In any case, the answer I had in mind to Monsieur Villon’s question was:  in my driveway.  Long after the wintry landscape beyond my windows had melted into a nasty brown tableau of mud and tire ruts, the cypress trees shading our long, perilously precipitous driveway kept it as white and unblemished as Everest, while at the top I twitched and slobbered and counted out freezer bags.

            I was bored and desperate and that’s probably why I got interested in the astrological news I read online:  The Zodiac had slipped.  Because of the moon's gravitational pull on the earth, or something, many of us who had gone through our lives as one sign suddenly had to get used to being another.

That was fine with me.  My birthday is in early August and I get seriously sick of reading: 

“Leo lady, you are a true lioness, fearless, proud, generous to fault – a natural leader!”

Me?

No way.  I’m petty, sullen and afraid of practically everything, including basements.  And leadership?  If I were in a crowded theater, noticed it was on fire and shouted, “Run,” people would just sit there and burn to death.  My dog doesn’t come when I call!

A more believable description of me would say something like:  “You are touchy, resentful, deeply neurotic.  Probably even your mother dislikes you.  Stay away from automatic weapons, and avoid thinking too hard about freezer bags.”

The literature for my “new” sign, Cancer the Crab, doesn’t go quite that far, but it does include terms like “easily offended,” “mood swings,” and “prone to insecurity.”  Yes!  I’m home!  I’m a crab, humping along sideways cussing over my shoulder.  As T.S. Eliot wrote, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floor of silent seas.”

Entertained, I kept surfing the Net until I found a site registering reaction to the new Zodiac.  Not everybody was as happy as I was.  One guy had written:

“Ain’t no Aqueous!  Born a Pieces, lived a Pieces, going to die a Pieces!  Don’t know nothing about no Aqueous!”

That made me thrash around on the floor laughing.  Here was this idiot who believed his life was controlled by mysterious astrological forces when he was too stupid even to spell them.

Then suddenly I stopped laughing.  Because there I was, stuck at the top of an icy hill at the anal end of forever, rolling on the rug like an inbreed and having inappropriate thoughts about freezer bags, all alone in an infinite universe except for somebody who kept beating a drum and saying “in my pants.”  Barking mad, and all because:  it had snowed.

So the lesson I took from the snowstorm was humility.  There is no place for complacence in a world where roofs cave in and marriages fail not only from mysterious astrological influences but from simple meteorology.  Like my old granny used to say, there is nothing like a blizzard to make you feel like a helpless pawn buffeted by incomprehensible galactic forces.

So, duly chastened, we conclude with your narrator gazing out at the winterscape beyond her window and asking wistfully, “Ah, will it ever be warm again?”

It is a rhetorical question, Gentle Reader, and if you answer “in my pants,” I may have a freezer bag with your name on it.
                                                               END

CORN: A MARVELOUS STRANGE PLANT

     Yes!  I know it’s been roughly 200 years since I wrote a new Bob!  That’s why I keep dishin’ up these leftovers.  Here’s one about corn, which I’ve got a lot of nerve writing because I never grow it anymore.  It’s all that crap you read about having to pick it the minute it’s ripe, then eat it as soon as it’s picked.  I couldn’t stand the stress. 

CORN:  A MARVELOUS STRANGE PLANT

By Robin Ford Wallace

.

            There is something about corn that drives people crazy.

            I noticed it the first time I raised corn, when I was a young sharecropper in Atlanta.  I’ve already told the story in this space, but I’ll repeat that my friend Mary Hart and I were helping a couple in their 80s grow a garden.  They had a post-juvenile-delinquent son named Jimmy who was 60-odd and still lived at home.  He had always been peculiar but it was the corn that drove him over the edge.  He fussed over it and brooded over it and guarded it like a dog, and finally he began accusing us of stealing it.

But what stands out in my memory is planting the corn that spring.  It was close to sunset.  Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows as the dew began to fall, dropping in the seed corn.  Jimmy followed close behind us, breathing noisily and pouring fertilizer on top.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something intrinsically nasty about the whole thing.

Now I’ve been reading the most interesting book, The Story of Corn, by Betty Fussell, and I’ve learned that that sort of thing has been going on for 10,000 years.

American Indians were crazy about corn.  They ate it green, ripe, dried, roasted, fried, ground and pickled.  Girls made a powder of it for their faces.  Timekeeping methods developed around its growing season.

Indian religions evolved around the great central fact that it was corn that kept people alive.  The Taino word “mahiz,” from which “maize” and the scientific name for corn, Zea mays, were derived, means “life-giver.” 

So there were corn gods and corn goddesses.  Peaceful North American Indians had their Green Corn Dance, and cannibalistic South American tribes ritually snarfed their enemies with a sacred side of corn.  “Corn maidens” and “corn kings” participated in what were presumably fertility rites, but after the thing with Jimmy I skimmed over that chapter. 

Anyway, that’s nothing.  The Maya were so crazy about corn they used human sacrifices as their preferred organic plant food.  In the book there is a particularly gruesome Mayan drawing of a prisoner tied to the altar, his stomach cut open, out of it growing a stylized stalk of guess what. 

            When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they had never seen anything like corn.  In his 1619 A New Herbal, Henry Lyte wrote:  “This Corne is a marvelous strange plant, nothing resembling any other kind of grayne, for it bringeth forth his seede cleane contrarie from the place where the Floures grow.”

Actually, corn has the peculiar arrangement of  two sets of flowers, one male and one female, separated as starkly on the plant as anything you will find in the Arab world.  The “Floures” Lyte was referring to were the male set, located in tassels on top of the plant.  These produce pollen.  The female flowers are found along incipient cobs about halfway down the stalk, and they mature into kernels after receiving pollen from the males.

Every kernel-to-be is fertilized separately, and this occurs by means of one individual filament, or silk, each sends up through the thick sheath that encloses them to catch a grain of pollen.  So each kernel is a separate fruit and may have a different daddy from its neighbor on the cob, which explains how corn ears may contain different-colored kernels in the same row. 

And that daddy might well be from another variety of corn.  The corn silk filament is a tiny target to aim for, and the male flowers make up for it via the shotgun approach, producing about 20,000 times as much pollen as needed to fertilize each kernel.  This pollen travels on the wind, and is eager to get there, so when you plant two kinds of corn anywhere near each other and expect them to produce true to kind, it is like landing a shipful of lonely sailors on a Polynesian isle populated by maidens with blue-black hair and coconut bras, and expecting them to exchange nothing but recipes.

Ironically, though corn is so good at pollinating itself, it can’t grow at all without human intervention.  The kernels are too solidly sheathed in the husk to germinate.

Well, it’s a crazy kind of plant.

            Anyway, the wheat-eating European settlers arrived to find ancient America built largely on corn, thought for a minute, and then built modern America entirely on corn.  You will now find corn products in mayonnaise, soap, paint, insecticide, shaving cream, embalming fluid and beer.  

            There is a quote I read somewhere by beat poet Allen Ginsberg in which he dismissed any notion of the loftiness of human communication with:  “We’re just meat talkin’ to meat.”  The book points out that meat is corn, too

            There are corn products in the car you drive to the grocery store, the cart you push through it, the store building itself and every product you buy there with the possible exception of fresh fish.  Which means that we’re corn, too – with the possible exception of those of us who live exclusively on fresh fish.

            Well.  We seem to have very little room left to discuss actually growing corn, which is fine because I don’t.  Everything you read about corn says you have to pick it at the exact moment it’s ready, then race it to a pot of water you already have boiling, or else the sugar starts turning to starch and it’s ruined.  So when I’ve grown corn, that’s what I’ve tried to do.

            It made me crazy.

            But if you like corn, by all mean go ahead and plant it.  Ignore the experts who give you the crap about sprinting to the boiling pot, and ignore me raving about the sacredness and smarminess of corn.  What do we know?

            We’re just corn talkin’ to corn.  

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

Like Woman Wailing for her Demon -- Something.

I wrote this a couple  of years ago when we had run out of habanero sauce.  Earlier, I had written a column with the theme that hot peppers were a substitute for True Love.  By the time I got to this one I had boiled the idea down to something a bit more basic. 

Interestingly, since then I've noticed how useful hot peppers are as a substitute for practically everything.  You'd be amazed how much hab sauce I put away when I was quitting smoking, for example, and when I'm on a diet I love nothing more than a pile of jalapeno slices beside the cottage cheese in my Everything Salad.  So eventually I expect I’ll manage to replace all my vices with hot peppers and be thin and attractive and fatal to the touch like Dr. Rappaccini’s daughter.     

This winter it's jalapenos we lack – our crop failed last summer -- and I've had the fun of foraging through Hispanic markets for new supplies.  Anyway I reckon it's whatever you're missing that makes you wail for it.  I'll stop there.

Like Woman Wailing for Her Demon Habanero …

By Robin Ford Wallace

“From you have I been absent in the spring …”

Yes, my darling, the sonnets again.  April, and here I am drowning my sorrows in red wine and poetry, aching for you in iambic pentameter.

I just looked out the window to see the redbud in full glorious flower and the first tulip blooming.  I took no joy in them.  As the Bard would say, “Yet seemed it winter still, and you away.”

I still can’t believe you’re gone.  I didn’t see it coming.  You were always there when I reached for you. 

Did I take you for granted?  Maybe, but it was the way I accept sunshine as a premise of life.  You lit up my days.  It was the heat of you that got me through each winter.  It still gives me a physical pain to think of that awful, awful day when I looked and you were gone.

            Gone to the last drop.  I must have used the last of you in those chicken wings last week….

            Well, Gentle Reader, did you really think all this wistful Shakespearean yearning was over some lost love?  Clearly you have never tasted my habanero sauce. 

Habanero sauce, made from homegrown peppers, is to Bob’s Little Acre what ketchup is to McDonald’s.  It is sprinkled on beans, chicken and scrambled egg sandwiches here.  It is poured into soups and marinades.  Eggrolls are dipped in it, fried foods are unimaginable without it, and it is smuggled in pockets to social evenings as a surreptitious amendment to other people’s cooking.

And I ran out last Tuesday.  What is lost love next to that? 

Those of us who have attained the middle years grow resigned to doing without the youthful passions in any case.  No one compares our eyes to pellucid pools; nobody remembers what color they are.  No one sidles up to ask us for anything naughtier than our vinaigrette recipe.  No one whispers anything sweeter in our ears than, “Is there pudding?” 

Yes, gone are the days of burning kisses.  But for those among us who still yearn for a little fire in life, there are, anyway, habanero peppers.

Habaneros are native to the Yucatan peninsula, not to Havana as the name implies.  They are odd, boxy little peppers that start out green and turn a beautiful sunny orange when ripe, and it is at that stage that they are most seductive.  They are among the hottest peppers in the world, but it’s not just their heat that makes them irresistible, it’s their amazing bouquet.

Cut into a ripe habanero and out rushes a smell that has been called fruity – which it is, but maybe sort of forbidden-fruity – and flowery – which it is, but it’s a Dr. Rappaccini’s-poison-garden kind of flowery.  It’s a fiery, intoxicating orange perfume like nothing else in the universe, and once you get hooked nothing else in the universe will do.

Habaneros are too hot to be eaten out of hand.  I have known a couple of people who have done it, but these tended to be of the male persuasion and did so less for pleasure than to make some statement regarding the physiological evidence of their gender, an appendage, by the way, that historically has led to many other decisions equally unwise.

But chopped fine and well diluted with onion and tomato, raw habaneros make an incomparable salsa fresca, and habanero chili will get you through the most Siberian of winters. 

Or you can make them into habanero sauce.

Begin by growing habaneros.  You can buy plants at a garden center or start your own easily from seed.  In late April, transplant three feet apart somewhere they get plenty of sun.  Keep them weeded and don’t worry much about water, and your plants will oblige you by festooning themselves with peppers that keep coming until frost as long as you pick them promptly.  If you don’t have time to deal with them immediately, you can freeze them, whole and unprocessed, in Zip-loc bags, where they’ll keep for a year.

To make the sauce:  Put on gloves!  The capsaicin in habaneros, which is what makes them hot, burns skin like napalm, and no matter how well you protect your hands they’re going to hurt anyway, but gloves give you a fighting chance.

With a sharp knife, core each pepper and remove the seeds.  The more nimbly you can do this, the less the pain will be later.  While processing the peppers, and for as long afterwards as humanly possible, don’t touch your eyes, nose, mouth, or any other sensitive part of your body.  Nor anybody else’s, for that matter, I should note bitterly, for such among the readership as may still be so fortunate as to have opportunity to profit by such advice.

            Put the peppers in a pot, add white vinegar to cover, and bring to a boil.  Simmer until tender, about 20 minutes.  Then puree in the blender or food processor, add salt to taste, pour into jars or bottles, and eat on everything except breakfast cereal. 

            Just a few plants produce a lot of sauce, and a little goes a long way.  Thus, historically I’ve been awash with the stuff, passing it out like business cards to people who don’t even want it.  Then one day I opened the pantry door to find there was nothing behind the paper towels but more paper towels.  My habanero supply had gone extinct before I’d even known it was endangered.

            Like so much else.

            But on a positive note, habaneros are a renewable source of sizzle, and soon a summer crop will add bright orange color to my gray existence.  I must not repine.

            If I do, it is just that the siren call of spring inspires strange longings in blood not yet cold, and sometimes a girl simply aches for –

            Habanero sauce, Gentle Reader.  What did you suppose?

END