We Have Nothing to Fear But -- Well, Got A Minute?

     2011’s spring has been the most horrible of my life.  For me, things started with that damn tornado and got worse from there.   So with that in mind, I thought I’d unearth this fossil from a couple of years ago, when it was spring and I was whining about my misfortunes because it was – get this – raining.  Them was the days!

WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT – WELL, GOT A MINUTE?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It’s not just media hype.

And it’s not just a clever ploy by the government to pull the wool over our eyes about what’s really going on in Washington, either.  This sickness is real, folks, and it’s serious.  If it gets much worse, we’re going to have to start using that ugly word:

Pandemic.

How did it all begin?  Weather conditions brought it on, and human nature did the rest.  At first there was just Patient Zero, standing on her porch and staring bitterly out into the rain on a soggy Saturday.  Then the whole thing snowballed and next there was –

Well, actually, there was just Patient Zero again, standing on the same porch and staring bitterly out into the same rain, only this time it was a soggy Sunday. 

Then there was another wet Saturday.  Then another wet Sunday.  Then another rainy weekend and another and another, until Patient Zero saw the spring slipping through her fingers, so she picked a flowerpot up off the porch railing, determined to plant it anyway, but on the bottom of the pot was something cold and slimy, and suddenly it wasn’t just the spring slipping through her fingers. 

It was slugs. 

And as she shrieked and gibbered and sprinted toward hot water and soap, she realized she had come down with all the symptoms.  What she had was a slobbering, full-fledged, possibly terminal case of:

Whine Flu.

Mark Twain said that everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.  That’s not strictly true.  The ancient historian Herodotus wrote of a North African people who declared war on the desert wind and marched out with all their weapons to kill it. 

The wind blew up a sandstorm and the armies were subsumed and never seen again, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, they did, too, do something about it.

Most of us, however, follow the Twain model and stick to whining.  Thus the pandemic. 

Of course I’m Patient Zero in the case study cited above, but I refuse to believe I’m the only one whining.  Spring is what the gardener lives for and this has been the Spring that was Not.  At first every weekend was too cold to play outside, then it got so wet, you kept expecting an old man to float by in a boat with two of every kind of animal.

But it wasn’t just the rain that gave me Whine Flu.  It was the slugs.

Earlier this year, I planned to write a column on garden pests.  I didn’t get any further than the title (“Insects and the Single Girl”).  The world of invertebrates unnerves me so deeply, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

There is nothing dainty about me.  I cuss and drink beer.  But there is something about a caterpillar that brings out my Inner Girlie Girl.  I’m talking about those tent worms that come down from the trees by the millions, the ones with white rings around their heads.  They don’t seem to have eyes but sometimes they rear up and wave their faces at you blindly, as if they know by your smell you’re the one they want, and there’s nowhere you can go that they can’t track you down. 

“Eek,” says my Inner Girl.

Next to slugs, though, caterpillars are cuddly.  There is something about a slug that brings out my Inner Fay Wray. 

Slugs are why I haven’t gone barefoot for 19 years, why I wear gloves at the recycling center, and why I never eat eggplant, mushrooms or anchovies.  (Wedged eggplant, and sliced mushrooms, look similar to slugs.  Anchovies are identical.)

Here are the rules:  I don’t touch slugs.  I don’t touch anything a slug has touched.  I don’t touch anything that a slug might have touched. 

Which, in this weather, means: anything on my porch.  The constant rain has brought armies of fresh, juicy slugs sliding up the posts.  By night, they feast obscenely on the tender seedlings waiting on the porch railings to be planted.  By day, they nestle snotlike beneath the pots, waiting to ambush my unsuspecting fingertips with their vomit-inducing touch. 

“WAAHHH!” says my Inner Fay Wray.  I head for the hills.

Which brings us naturally to the subject of bears.

Doesn’t it seem there have been a whole lot of newspaper reports about bears eating people in the past couple of years?  Or is it just me?   That’s possible.  I walk the rim of Cloudland Canyon two or three afternoons a week with my dogs, and as such I find myself looking over my shoulder sometimes, feeling, you know, edible.  But I’ve never seen a bear there. 

Now, however, the Sentinel reported that a bear was found dead on I-59.  The woods are so thick with bears, it appears, they’re interfering with traffic.  So on my hikes these days I’ve started feeling, you know, tasty.

            And my fears in life are not limited to being eaten by a bear or touched by a slug.  We haven’t even touched on airplanes, basements or dental hygienists. 

Some fears I can do something about.  I can buy poison for the slugs (though right now everybody’s sold out), and laugh if you will but I own a can of bear spray (though so far the childproof cap has proved impregnable).  But what about the big ones, age, sickness, death? 

No, I think maybe life is all about being afraid of things you can’t do anything about and wanting things you can’t have, any more than you can order up a sunny day when it’s raining.  As we’re no longer stupid enough to declare war on the weather, our only logical course of action is to complain impotently.

So whining, we must conclude, is not just a pandemic. 

It is the human condition.

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

Wealth. Poverty. Asparagus.

     I haven't posted here for ages!  Why?  Well, death, depression, and did I tell you about the tornado?  But last week I cheered up long enough to finish this piece I'd started about asparagus way long ago.  

Wealth, Poverty, the Human Condition – Oh, And Did I Mention Asparagus?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Oh, hello there, darling.  My secretary said you’d rung.  I’m down here in the garden, cutting asparagus.   Do join me!

But I’d leave that jacket with the butler.  Of course it’s only April but in the sunshine it’s already hot.   In fact, I’ll ring for the maid to bring us something cold, shall I?

            T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month but personally I cannot imagine anything nicer.  A month that contains not only wildflowers but asparagus?  Well, Eliot  was a common little man and I expect he drank.   

Cutting asparagus in the spring gives a girl the same cozy feeling she gets from opening dividend checks.  Make that one little investment, darling, and every year it pays and pays.

Ah, here’s Matilda to take our order.  Champagne for me, I think; one’s feeling distinctly bubbly today.  But I expect you’re more at home with beer, aren’t you? 

SPLAT!

            That, Gentle Reader, was the sound of an oak tree snapping in the April 27 tornado, crashing down like 100 feet of the clumsiest metaphor your narrator ever wrote, and burying her vegetable garden under tons of hardwood, brush and poison ivy vines. 

Not to mention knocking crap out of the latest Bob’s Little Acre.

            As you may have gathered, it was to have been a column about asparagus.  My friend Mary wanted to start an asparagus bed and had asked my advice.  Where I was going with all the maid-and-butler stuff was to show that though asparagus since ancient times has been rich-people food, the poorest home gardener may easily ascend the socioeconomic ladder, at least gastronomically, by putting in an asparagus row.

            But the column was already in trouble!  Your narrator seems congenitally incapable of imparting useful horticultural information without tossing in some profundity or another about the human condition, to the point that a simple statement such as, “Tomatoes benefit greatly by a side-dressing of manure,” might keep the regular reader awake for a week, muttering, “What?  What?” to a cold and answerless ceiling.

            In this case, I was trying to churn out some wisdom about poverty versus wealth in America.  Mary is a starving artist and struggles to pay the bills each month, but she has 5000 years of culture at her fingertips and can order lunch in Italian without breaking a serious sweat.  So what does poverty mean, really?

            But after I’d started the column I happened to drop by the house of a better-heeled friend as she harvested her own asparagus.  My friend doesn’t have maids and butlers but that day she did have two paid workers helping her in the garden, and she also had asparagus so plump and bursting with vitality, it made mine look like one of those tubercular Poe heroines standing next to the Campbell Kids.  She gave the credit for it to mushroom compost and her clever yardman.

            And that wasn’t the only problem with the column.  I was also trying to work in a way to tell you about the day that Mary cooked the lobsters.  

It was late last summer, and Mary had been feeling poor so she’d splurged on live lobsters from the Bi-Lo.  Lobsters reminded her of her idyllic childhood in the Northeast, when summers were spent in Maine.  Meanwhile I’d been lonely and had called, and when she told me her plan I invited myself over to her farm, buying my own lobster on the way.

Because it was so hot, Mary was wearing only an elastic-waisted skirt pulled up under her arms, which for some reason looked very elegant, and she boiled the lobsters alive, saying over her shoulder with merry sophistication, “I hate to murder them but they’re so delicious.” 

We ate them at a table out on the lawn, washed down with red wine, and the memory sustained me through the long and terrible winter that followed.

Not the memory of the lobsters.  The lobsters were a nightmare!  They escaped from their boxes and before Mary murdered them chased me around the kitchen while I jumped on chairs and shouted, “Eek.”   Then eating them was like joining the Manson Family.  You had to keep cracking open their pitiful little bones, and sometimes green slime slid out.   I’d have been much happier with a hot dog!

No, what sustained me was the memory of the whole golden afternoon, the intrinsic coolness of having a place to go where people make art and eat rich-people food when they’re feeling especially poor and generally live their lives in a Hemingway novel, and where if I knock they let me in.  Mary’s rich because she’s got the 5000 years of culture, and I’m rich because I’ve got Mary, and of course things like Shakespeare and my garden and –

SPLAT! 

OK, so I don’t have my garden.  Maybe the whole moral of the story, if there is one, is that it’s a joke to get all smug and complacent and ring-for-the-butler-darling when the universe routinely smacks us down as swiftly and inexorably as in the pivotal scene of  “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” 

            Epilogue:  I never finished the asparagus column.  Mary went ahead and planted her asparagus patch without benefit of my wisdom, and I think she made it too small.  If anyone is still interested in my advice here it is:  You can’t be too rich or too thin or have too much asparagus.

            But who cares what I think about asparagus, much less wealth, poverty or for God’s sake the human condition?  I’m a garden writer without a garden, just a blob of human jetsam crouched down here muttering amid the one row of vegetables spared to me after the storm, some straggling yellow straightnecks that, any minute now, the squash borers may very well –

SPLAT!

END

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