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

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.