I've been having one of those unhappy discombobulating kind of days --  the newspaper deadline fell on the same date as the IRS deadline for cryin' out loud!  And believe me, that's the tip of the iceberg.  Anyway, somehow I haven't gotten around to finishing my latest piece, another diatribe on asparagus, capitalism and the joys of menstruation. 
     Or, anyway, about asparagus.  In any case it isn't done yet, and I was feeling awful for not having posted anything up here recently when I happened to realize I'd never put this classic Bob on the blog.  Or I don't think I did.  (I told you I was discombobulated.)  What I did to check was Google "Bob's Little Acre," "space aliens," and "crop circles," and nothing came up.  (Or nothing familiar did.  Try Googling it yourself sometime.  Who knows what you'll find?)
     Anyway after I read it I felt even more discombobulated.  It mentions my puppy then who is a 70-pound dog now and a friend then who hasn't spoken to me in over two  years now, but even six years older and uglier I still find the ways of the universe just as puzzling.  Hell, more so! 
     And furthermore, the column reminded me I haven't planted my beets ....
 

THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line.”

            This is a line from a Brian Eno song that my husband is always quoting me, perhaps in an attempt to convince me he knows what “heuristics” means, or how to spell it.

             Or perhaps he means to express an artistic contempt for straight lines.  This puzzles me, as he

is always expressing similar contempt for the not-so-straight lines I make when laying out my garden

rows.

            Straight lines in the vegetable garden serve a purpose.  If you plant beets in a row in the garden, what comes up, if it’s in the row, is not guaranteed to be a beet but is more likely to be than anything that is not.  It’s not great odds but as good as you get in this racket.  Then you keep weeds to a minimum by a wholesale slaughter of everything in between the rows, on the principle that if it’s out of line it’s probably not a beet.

            But I’m not a straight-line kind of person.  I set out from point A with every intention to travel to point B, but somehow I always go wrong, the road turns to dirt, and I end up in Alabama. 

Thus it is no surprise that my life path has not led from the bottom straight to the top.  Instead, I have zigzagged, dipped and nose-dived like a tri-plane under fire, finally crash-landing to my considerable surprise onto a dirt road in Alabama, from whence I write you this garden column.  Sort of.

In any case, the straight lines in my garden tend to morph into something else, not only because of my imperfect grasp of geometry but because of my puppy, Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who enjoys nothing more than tumbling through the garden with a stake in her mouth, twine around her legs and evil in her heart.  So rows are constantly restaked and beets stray from the straight and narrow through no fault of their own.    

            Fortunately, straight rows are not the only options available to the gardener. You can grow plants in patches and raised beds or even use them to create crop circles to signal to aliens in outer space.  This is a free country. 

My friend Paula once had a garden shaped like a kayak.  Or two, rather.  She had a pair of kayaks in dry dock in her back yard.  They hadn’t moved for so long, their best chance for hitting the water again was global warming melting the polar caps and providing Marietta, Georgia, an outlet to the sea.

But Paula found that her lawn ornaments had a horticultural use:  They had killed the grass underneath them, so she moved them and planted peppers and tomatoes in her new, ready-made plots, repositioning the boats where she wanted more arable farmland.

            This accidental approach to garden design is one to which I am also addicted.  I use jellyrolls of spoiled hay for mulch, and when a bale is used up it leaves behind it a black circle of beautiful compost in which I can never resist planting something. 

This is why I have circles of plants everywhere, not necessarily positioned with aesthetics in mind but where the hay bale stopped rolling when it fell off the truck.  Thus I have a circle of breathtaking gladiolas at the bottom of the hill where it would take the FBI to find them. 

I’m not arguing in favor of circles.  They just happened, and if they mean something to aliens observing us from space I don’t know what it is but I hope it’s something along the lines of Send Cash or Bring Beer.  If I used square hay bales instead of round, my garden would look like a quilt and I suppose I’d be just as happy though I can’t speak for the aliens.

But somewhere I read that it is flowerbeds laid out by the Golden Mean, or Golden Ratio, that are most pleasing to the eye.  I looked the Golden Mean up and it is:  1.61803399.  In case you don’t know what that means, I also learned that the whole should be to the larger part as the larger part is to the smaller part. 

Do what?  I think it would be easier just to borrow one of Paula’s kayaks.

The Golden Mean must be something along the same lines as Feng Shui, another concept I have never grasped.  Paula’s big on it, though.

Paula adores buying furniture but she can’t bear to throw any away, so when she gets new things she just puts them in front of the old ones.  No one has seen her actual floor for seven years, though there are trails from room to room through stacks of books and magazines and other things in piles, so you can navigate if you know what you’re doing though I wouldn’t try it in the dark.

Anyway, in one corner of the dining room, where there was a molecule of clear space on a sideboard, Paula put a little indoor fountain, and she explained to me it gave the room Feng Shui.  Personally, the tinkling just stimulated my bladder.

So maybe I’m not an aesthetic concept kind of person any more than a straight-line person.  In fact, the more I work at it, the more random my garden seems to get.  A space alien observing Bob’s Little Acre with its patches and circles and eccentric rows would have to conclude it developed more through chance evolution than intelligent design.

Sometimes it puzzles me just as much as I’m sure it would the space alien.  Oh, not just how those gladiolas got to the bottom of the hill but how I came to be gardening this particular little acre on this particular dirt road in Alabama.  Not by a straight line, I can tell you. 

Maybe it’s just where I landed when I fell off the truck.

END

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

 

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors: The Jumping Frog of Bob's Little Acre

For out-of-towners, this one probably has a little too much back-story.  Suffice it to say there's a developer out there who is seriously mad at your humble narrator as a result of some articles she wrote.  He sent this awful, awful letter to the newspaper, copying everybody in the county government, accusing me of everything up to shooting his dog and stealing his Bible.  It hurt my pink feelings I suppose; but not enough that I won't point out the NEXT time I see somebody destroying the American banking system, bilking the county government, or obliterating civilization as we know it.  (Don't thank me.  It's just my job!)  The Sentinel hasn't printed the letter yet, perhaps because it is so LONG, but I felt impelled to respond anyway since the whole town seems to have read it.

Anyway I guess maybe I shouldn't have dragged front-page local issues into Bob's Little Acre; but I had this image of myself as a big damn frog hopping around my vegetable rows menacingly and zapping intruders with my tongue; and where do metaphors work like that but the Acre?

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors:  The Jumping Frog of Bob’s Little Acre

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Thwppt.  Gotcha!

            Yeah, hey, it’s me, down here in the garden, catching insects with my long, sticky tongue.  Can I interest you in a fly?

I expect you’re wondering how I came to be insectivorous.  You know the real twist?  I actually came down here to eat worms.

Self-pity, don’t you know!  Somebody objected to my investigative journalism.  Well, somebody wrote a minor novel objecting to my investigative journalism, to be exact, and then they copied everybody in town on it, to the point that by now 9000 county officials plus lawyers, busboys, calico housecats and my Uncle Milroy in the spirit world have all heard the word:

ROBIN IS MEAN AND UGLY AND HAS WARTS!

Honestly, I haven’t felt so unpopular since my big sister Laura gave a piñata party for all our little friends with me as the piñata.   So, consumed with self-pity, down I slunk to the garden to eat worms. 

That’s the metaphor, I mean, but in fact once I’d settled into the mud I couldn’t see the point.  Do you know how hard I worked to build up my worm population?  I kept the garden under a foot of hay all that first winter, and spent good money at the bait store.

            But even if, from a horticultural as well as a gustatory standpoint, I decided against a literal ingestion of invertebrates, I was fully engaged in consuming them figuratively.  How had this happened? 

Making people mad is not what I ever set out to do!  I wanted to write about organic gardening.  Tomatoes!  Turnips!  Pretty flowers!  I am a gentle soul, and it was my ambition to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

But as I brooded darkly, a fly buzzed by, and without looking up from my somber musings –

Thwppt! 

 – I shot out my tongue and nabbed it. 

            What had come over me? I wondered as I chewed thoughtfully.  It had been rather a while since lunch, certainly, and, as vermin goes, the fly had looked unusually toothsome; but as a rule I am less impulsive.

Then the explanation dawned on me:  I had been singing Kermit’s song, “It Isn’t Easy Bein’ Green.”  It’s my favorite poor-me song (though I also favor the Avenue Q spoof, “It Sucks To Be Me”).  Thus it was only fitting that the Metaphor Fairy had turned me into a frog.

Shocking?  Well, sure, at first.  I’ve known people who became frogs before but most of them were tadpoles. 

Shortly, though, things normalized.  A girl gets used to anything!  Even eating flies isn’t that funky after the crap they used to serve at my high school.  Every Thursday, lunch was this orange-colored chili that made vomiting redundant.  And is there really anything weirder than a Fig Newton?

Plus, it wasn’t long before it struck me that froghood is not that bad a metaphor for small-town journalism.  In the normal course of things, you paddle around your little pond ribbiting benevolently on about the new Methodist Women’s recipe book, or croaking out accounts of the local government’s latest budgetary crisis, deeply fulfilled when you score a dramatic quote like: 

“I am sick and TARD of having to BAIG for every LIGHT BUB.”

But then some hairy horsefly of an issue flits by – say some noisy citizen who rails against government more or less full time, but now wants it to build him an aqueduct; or a business that brags it is boosting your community’s tax base, but hasn’t itself paid taxes since they were more than metaphorically a matter of rendering unto Caesar  – and before you know you’re doing it:

Thwppt! 

It’s a job hazard!  You know perfectly well you’re not the New York Times, you’re just a hinterlands hack leaning on Old Betsy and spitting contemplatively from time to time as you report on this year’s hay crop. 

But a backwoods journalist is a journalist just the same, paid – though not much, not much – to keep eyes, ears and notebook open.  So should Napoleon Bonaparte prance across your line of vision in an advanced state of nature, what can you do but push your coonskin cap back on your forehead, point at His Imperial Majesty and shout:

LOOKY!  YONDER GOES A NEKKID EMPEROR!

Or, as we say in Frog:

Thwppt!   

Really, even in a garden column you kill a few flies if you’re halfway paying attention.  It’s all very well to talk about playing quietly in the dirt, but then you notice the Freep’s “Five Tips” gardening hints referring to petunias as something you deadhead, or dirt as something they sell at Holcomb’s, and  –

Thwppt!

 – there you go again.  Those who read the Bob blog know that BLA prides itself on being to the extension agent:

“WHAT WOODWARD WAS TO NIXON!”

So.  Anyway.  I try hard to report truthfully and fairly, and I hate it if in so doing I’ve made anybody mad.  I’d add, though, that if you come into a little pond like this and do it any kind of injury you cannot realistically expect big wet kisses from the local frog.

But enough of that!  Since I’m down here anyway, I thought I’d hop through the rows, maybe get a little actual garden writing done for a change.  It’s hard to grow anything with metaphors this thick on the ground but an extension service article last week said February is the perfect time to plant asparagus.

February is not, of course, the perfect time to do anything, and what the writer probably meant was that he’d be out of a job if he couldn’t find anything that could remotely go into the ground, but –

Oh, my God, I’ve done it again.

Thwppt!  

END

   

Oldie: A Little Light Flower Fiction

I’m posting this oldie on the blogsite because I looked it up to quote from in the Radio-Free Robin I’m writing and noticed it wasn’t already on here.  It’s really not my best work but I’m putting it up for a couple of reasons. 

First, after the Dade board of ed’s decision to commence banning books being taught by its English teachers, I got interested in profanity and sexual content in literature, and I was going to use the opening paragraph to prove that even a garden column can be objectionable if you try hard enough.

Second, the guy with the ski poles I mentioned toward the end of this column as being a man I knew slightly later became a better friend.  Some local readers may recognize him.  I thought it was interesting that I was dead wrong about the antiaphrodisiacal effect of the trekkers.  He does all right in that department ...  

A LITTLE LIGHT FLOWER FICTION

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It was a happening kind of night at the Heliotrope, a working-class dive where angiosperms stopped to vegetate an hour or two after a hard day down at the plant.  Herb walked into the bar wilted from a 12-hour shift photosynthesizing, but when he saw Iris sipping a mimosa at the bar he suddenly felt fresh as a  daisy.  As he considered the lily, his stamens became turgid.  Whoa!  This babe was in full bloom!

            “Hey, sweet pea,” said Herb, planting himself on the stool beside her.  “How’s about a little cross-pollination?”

            This is the beginning of a story I started some years ago, for reasons that I now forget.  Perhaps it was to take advantage of the literary market’s glaring paucity of racy fiction about plants; or perhaps I simply misunderstood the meaning of the term “garden writer.”  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve got it right even now. 

Regular readers of this feature, if any, have no doubt figured out by now that it’s not a normal gardening column.  One reason for that is your narrator’s dislike of much mainstream garden writing, which, if  you take out the merchandising plugs and the fantastically boring quotes from interviewees, often boils down to something like:  Flowers are pretty and you ought to grow some.

            So perhaps I go too far in the other direction, telling fantastically boring stories about my relations and making up tawdry little tales of horticultural romance.  But I am hardly the first to think of stories starring plants.  Folklore is full of them. 

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man the nymphs were all crazy for, but he spurned their affections and instead fell in love with the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, his own reflection in a pool.  The reflection appeared to feel exactly the same way, but as a practical matter consummation was not in the cards, so the young man pined away and the gods turned him into the narcissus flower. 

I probably would have turned him into something rather worse, but the reasoning of the Greek gods was always oblique.  Grant them amorous favors, for example, and you are likely to get turned into a white cow, when really you would have preferred jewelry or a new car.

            Sweet William and Black-Eyed Susan were apparently a hot item in another story, which confused me because I thought Sweet William was the one who died for love of Barbara Allen.  Well, maybe old Bill flitted, as it were, from flower to flower.

            Forget-me-nots, I read, were named when a medieval German knight, going to the banks of the Danube to gather the small blue flowers for his lady love, was carried off by a flash flood.  As he was borne off by the torrent, he tossed the bouquet to his squeeze and shouted, “Forget me not!”

            I was leery of this legend.  For one thing, a more practical exclamation would have been, “Help!”  And secondly, whatever he said, it stands to reason it would have been in German. 

I’m sensitive on such issues, having believed until rather late in life that Napoleon’s last words were “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”  Finally it struck me that if you were going to squander the last moments of life composing a palindrome, you would probably do it in a language you could actually speak.  But I looked it up, and the word for forget-me-not in German is Vergissmeinnicht, which means the same thing.

            I read a charming French story in which the main characters were a bluebell and a poppy.  It involved shepherd lads they wanted to marry, evil rich men who wanted to marry them, and very little that had much to do with them being a poppy and a bluebell, a fact which, if dwelled upon, would certainly limit their romantic possibilities.

             I completely understand this human compulsion to make up ridiculous stories about flowers.  There is so little else we can do with them.  They are so wildly attractive we want to eat them, or something, but that would be counterproductive and so we instead spin tales.

            And flowers do lend themselves to anthropomorphism.  Zinnias look to me like tall, friendly country girls who wear too much makeup and call everyone “hon.”  Pansies would be those small, mean women who smile sweetly and then say terrible things behind your back, and roses impossible prima donnas who are allergic to everything and are always demanding that you turn the thermostat up. 

            At this time of year, my favorite flowers are wildflowers, and at any season my favorite stories are ones that embarrass people I know, so I will conclude by telling a flower story of my own.

A couple of weeks ago I was at my favorite wildflower spot when I met a man I know slightly.  With him was a woman he was courting, and I thought how clever he was to bring a date to this place where bluebells and poppies bloomed riotously among lush white bloodroot, reducing your narrator, and indeed most women, to girlish shrieks and swoons of admiration.  The sly dog.

            But in his hands were those ski poles that hikers use to hike really fast, and instead of dallying among the flowers with his lady, he took off up the mountain at 90 mph, leaving her to follow as best she could, eating his dust.  Perhaps he sought to impress her with his speed, but if I’d been in her shoes I don’t think he’d have made much time.  Among poppies and bluebells, ski poles distinctly limit romantic possibilities.

            Well, I seem to have wasted some serious column inches here telling flower stories without imparting much useful information.  I had better close with something pithy.  How about:

            Flowers are pretty.  You should grow some.

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

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet, and an Evil Woman Named Ruby

     Jerry says I can't count on people to know the Ruby song:  We have officially reached farthood and what we take for popular culture nobody around us has a clue about.  He cited as evidence the failure of a young friend to recognize the "Green Acres" theme song.  (Gasp.)  But I was shaken up myself at Halloween when a sweet young thing of 25 I was volunteering with at the Canyon didn't know the Roller Derby Queen song even though -- brace yourself -- she had dressed up for the holiday as:  A Roller Derby queen.  

     I mentioned this to my friend Mary who's three years older and SHE DIDN'T KNOW IT EITHER.  So apparently the only two people who know the damn thing are me and Jim Croce and he's dead.

     FYI, youngsters, the RDQ was 5 foot 6, 215, a bleached-blonde mama with a streak of mean.  Most notably, she was built like a refrigerator with a head. 

     Now.  Ruby.  "Ruby" was a Kenny Rogers song wherein a paralyzed man watches helplessly as the woman he loves whores herself up to go out and "take her love to town."  He wants to shoot her but, as luck would have it, he can't move.  I'm not quite sure why I always found that so funny. 

     Anyway it's one of those ear worm songs you can't expunge from your consciousness, and I have never met a woman named Ruby without suspecting her of being Evil.   

   

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet And An Evil Woman Named Ruby:

Wherein A Gardener Takes Her Love To Town

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You’ve painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair.

Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere?

            OK, OK.  I get the idea.  Turn the damn thing off.  Infidelity is bad enough.  Country music just makes it worse.

Country music makes everything worse.

“Ruby” in particular has got to be one of the smarmiest songs ever written.  “You’ve painted up your lips,” indeed!  As if a little makeup means a girl is “taking her love to town.”  Honey, this is the South.  Nobody goes to the dump without lipstick. 

Nobody over 40, anyway.   I never painted much when it was a matter of gilding the lily but now that we’re talking sows’ ears and silk purses I get through buckets of the stuff. 

Not just lipstick, either, but the works, eyeliner and foundation and that gop you put on underneath to fill in the cracks.  They used to call it concealer, which sounded furtive and possibly illegal, the cosmetic equivalent of gun silencers or hush money, but I could live with that; who at my age has nothing to hide? 

Nowadays, though, they’ve changed the name to “primer” and they’ve put cutesy little brushes or rollers on the bottles so as you stand there in front of the mirror basically spackling yourself you feel not so much that you are primping as that you are shoring up your crumblin’ façade.  God, I hate getting old!

And that’s what all of it is about, the tubes and the brushes and the Age-Defyin’ Revlon, not so much feminine vanity as the reverse, a merciful reluctance to subject innocent humanity to the ruts and potholes left on a girl’s face by time’s winged chariot.  The line in the Ruby song that irritates me the worst is:  “The wants and the needs of a woman your age, Ruby I realize.”  Ha!  Like Kenny Rogers has any clue how it feels to be female, and aging. 

Not that it’s any of Mr. Rogers’ business but yes, my wants and needs do include hair tint of some vaguely convincing shade, not too light because blondness in a person of my coloring really does have a certain “Want a date?” connotation, not too dark or my face looks like the Parthenon.  Not as in classic beauty, I mean, but as in white and 2000 years old.

But let’s stop beating that particular horse.  I’m not mad at Kenny Rogers, I’m mad at you. 

Did it ever occur to you that our little problem might not be the fault of my painted lips, tinted hair and general air of geriatric sluttiness?  That some itsy-bitsy part of the blame might be yours for leaving me high and dry when I  needed you most?  “Still need some company,” my sagging butt!  I could have used some this summer. 

How many times did I seek you out in June, lips curved in pleasurable anticipation?  You weren’t there.

And in July, when I reached for you in the sweet-smelling hay, what did I find?  Nothing much.

And in September, when I gave it one last, desperate try?  You just lay there, doing precisely and profoundly nothing.

As you have for years now!  Really, is it any wonder I looked for comfort elsewhere?

I didn’t have far to look.  There, right where you should have been, was your natural replacement, ruddy and robust while you were wan and white, strong and sweet while you were anemic and atrophied, above all there for me when you were MIA.

So yes, I’ve moved on, so you might as well put a cork in the “Ruby” crap.  I am not an Evil Woman and unlike the man in the song fate has not left you a crippled invalid.  

Fate has instead left you a hopeless vegetable.

            Specifically, a potato.

All right, Gentle Reader, if you have not inferred by now that our subject this week is the relative merits of the Irish potato and ipomea batatas, the sweet potato, I would remind you, gently, that this a gardening column.  Sort of.  What else would we be talking about? 

Here is the situation:  This summer, for the third year in a row, my potato crop failed miserably, while meanwhile my sweet potatoes ate New York.  So from necessity I began using sweet potatoes for many dishes I usually make with white, such as my famous roasted potato chunks.   

One day I used such pathetic few white potatoes as we harvested this year to make a batch of the chunks, and eating them I realized I actually preferred the sweet potato version.  White potatoes require hefty infusions of garlic and herbs.  With sweet potatoes, add salt and olive oil and you’re done.

Also this summer I learned that sweet potato leaves are edible.  You cook them like spinach or any other greens, and they’re not just good for you, they’re good, too. 

Irish potato foliage just lies there and withers.

It was thoughts like that one that led to my feelings of disloyalty.  Longtime readers may recall that in “Sex, Lies and Potatoes,” I dotingly misquoted:  “Ah, Spud, shall we be true to one another?”

            Apparently not.

Anyway, here is how you make the chunks:

            Peel or scrub sweet potatoes and cut into biggish cubes.  Toss with salt and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  Roast for 30 minutes in a 400-degree oven alongside whatever else you are cooking.  If you let the edges burn a bit they are particularly good.

            Compare these with the blander Irish potato version and I warn you, no matter how big a spud fan you are, you, too, may end up taking your love to town.

END

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

What About The Ench?

            When my friend Madelyn got married she wrote me the most wonderful email.  She'd married her longtime feller and they had done the thing quietly in a government building.  But this was California, San Francisco in fact, so even the no-frills civil ceremony took on a certain sparkle.  Mad’s brother happened to be in town and attended so they had the family element, and just when she had started to wonder if they shouldn’t have added a religious component of some kind as well, who should come in but some Buddhist monks?  Perhaps they were applying for a permit of some kind, but this being San Francisco maybe they had just sensed from the air that somebody needed them.

            Anyway I have digressed from my point, which is how happy she was.  She wrote something like:  “And suddenly there we were, in San Francisco getting married, both of us grinning like idiots.”

            Years later another couple of friends got married, this time with a big sloppy wedding in a pasture so everybody could watch, and as the vows were read I could see the same uncontrollable happiness shining from their faces – they were both of them grinning like idiots.  I was so pleased for them I cried a little.

            But it was only last night that I experienced that same unstoppable, uncontainable, stupid-making joy for myself.  I was so thrilled to be living in that particular minute in that particular place that I realized I was grinning like an idiot.  I was exalted and exhilarated and ecstatic and –

            – walking into the Ingle’s Market, which had been closed for four months after the tornado.

            All right.  There’s probably a little more to it than that.  It was the day after the torrential rains of Labor Day, which had turned the air so unseasonably cool you had to wear a jacket.  I had just trotted around Cloudland Canyon for the first time since the summer got so hot.  The leaves had already turned color and started falling from the drought, so it was like finding the door into autumn.

            I like summer and dislike winter, but I loved the pseudo-fall!  It hadn’t been cool enough to run since maybe June but now I was jogging along like the Russian Army, and the weather was so bracing even my 12-year hound dog – I usually leave her at home now for the long hikes – was able to keep up. 

            Then when I was through I was able – finally! – to pop into my pet grocery store at the foot of the mountain to pick up what we needed for supper.  It was one of those moments when, instead of wondering how on earth I ended up at the ass end of nowhere, I remember I’m living at the throbbing heart of the universe.

            Plus Ingle’s has added bulk goods in big clear containers like at Earth Fare, so you can buy raw almonds by the ounce …

            Anyway, it’s embarrassing to be so happy about a grocery store, but I’m old enough now to understand you take your happiness where you find it.  Here is a “Boblet” I wrote last Friday, after the Ingle’s had reopened on Wednesday.  

O FRABJOUS DAY!  But What About the Ench?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            I met a neighbor tonight in the Food Lion.  He had a basketful of groceries and I only had three items which I was carrying in my arms.  Gallantly, he insisted I go first.  I let him persuade me, put my three items on the counter, then practically threw myself on the floor and commenced to twitch and drool as I went into full-blown Apology Mode.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” I said.  He looked at me in amazement, wondering no such thing, but I had started now and couldn’t stop until I’d confessed to killing Kennedy.  “I mean,” I said, “I’m an Ingle’s loyalist, and now after all these months Ingle’s is open again and here I am at Food Lion.” 

He looked at me, stunned with boredom, but I rolled relentlessly on.  “See,” I said, “I was having dinner with my husband across the road and I remembered we needed these few things and I didn’t want to drive all the way down to Ingle’s and anyway I’ve already been in there earlier today.”

I was feeling guilty about being in the Food Lion because in Bob’s Little Acre I had keened so loud about missing Ingle’s after the tornado closed it down that the Ingle’s dietician from HQ in Asheville got to hear about it.  She left a message on the BLA blog saying not to lose hope, the store would reopen by the end of August.  That struck me as such joyous tidings that I put it on the front page of the Sentinel that week as a news brief. 

Then this week, with the store’s grand reopening on Wednesday, I made them let me in on Monday and I got the manager, Dewayne, to pose for a picture in front of one of the new self-checkout stations.  (I already have plans for a feature called “The Agony and the Ecstasy:  Dade Meets the Challenge of Self-Checkout.”) 

Anyway, I wrote a short news piece and when Ingle’s reopened on Wednesday our newspaper in its box by the store’s front door carried the headline that Ingle’s was reopening on Wednesday. 

If you are reading this in a big city somewhere and have started feeling embarrassed for me that the grocery store figures so large in my pathetically circumscribed life, please be assured that the rival newspaper in town carried the same headline.  Also let me point out that though I did begin the article by typing, “Excitement has mounted to fever pitch,” I made judicious use of the backspace key before hitting the Send button.         

But back to my neighbor and the Food Lion:  Finally, from the glassiness of the man’s eyes, I realized he might have spent the past few months paying attention to something – his job, his family, American Idol – besides my news and opinion writing about Ingle’s.  He didn’t care why I was in Food Lion.  So I took pity on him and began talking to him instead about the time I’d apologized to a woman I knew for having met her coming out of the Wal-Mart in Tiftonia. 

By that time he was just standing there like a pillar of salt, smiling here and there pleasantly though it could have been gas pains.  I think something in him had died.

Later, walking out to the parking lot, I realized I had apologized for something that needed no apology to somebody who didn’t want to be apologized to, and then I’d compounded the gaffe not only by apologizing for apologizing but by ranting on about past apologies. 

I’ve recently passed through a period of intense misery and in reaction undergone what in another person might have counted for a religious conversion.  I’ve tried to become warmer, less bitter and easier to get along with.  Putting my three items in the car and driving away, though, I realized I was just as slobbering a sociopath as ever.

And you know what?  I didn’t care!  It was Friday and I’d just had a good dinner and INGLE’S WAS FINALLY OPEN AGAIN.  Nothing, not even getting caught at Food Lion, not even an epiphany of my unworthiness to breathe air, could detract from my sheer joie de grocery store.  It was as if the last little hurt place from the tornado had finally healed over.  Ingle’s was open, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

            Which is when I remembered:  the bench.

Even though, four months after the tornado, the Sentinel in the paper box outside Ingle’s had finally been changed out from the April 27 edition that possibly nobody on earth read, to the Aug. 31 rag with the glad news detailed above, supposing you put two quarters in the box there was still no place to sit and read the glorious prose contained therein.  The bench was gone!  

            Not that I ever sat on the Ingle’s bench that much, but it was important to me.  Somebody must have been selling advertising on it because it was festooned with the names of local businesses.  But somebody else had very carefully, very meticulously, removed the first letter of every word, so what you read was:  ENEVA’S ESTAURANT,  I think maybe OORE’S UNERAL OME, but the one I particularly remember was ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING. 

I expect maybe my sense of humor is fairly basic but that always just killed me.  I remember dozens and dozens of time I’d stop by the Ingle’s on the way home from some awful meeting where somebody had hurt my feelings, or from some dreary day that had demonstrated to me the utter futility of going on, and I’d see ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING and practically pee myself all over again.  There is nothing like ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING to cheer a girl up.

So that is my point in this Boblet:  All is NOT QUITE perfect in paradise.  Local residents, join with me in agitating Ingle’s to bring back the “ench.”

And out-of-towners, thank God you have omething etter to do.

END

Bob's Little Acre 101: An Intro to Bob

    This is a column I wrote as an "Intro to Bob" for the Chattanoogan.com, which began carrying BLA in March.  Anyone familiar with Bob is apt to recognize quite a few of the bits I Frankensteined it together from.

Welcome to Bob’s Little Acre!  Come On Down.  Have a Seat.  Not There.

By Robin Ford Wallace

There is a saying that nowhere is one closer to God than in a garden. 

Duh. 

For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, it is a statement of the obvious.  Indeed, to stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But we have not yet been introduced.  How do you do? 

My name is Robin.  In my family, they call me Bob.  This patch of dirt is my garden, which my sister Laura named Bob’s Little Acre, from the nickname and from the Erskine Caldwell title “God’s Little Acre,” a novel about sin and suffering in the disgustin’ decayin’ South, which I do not suppose anyone reads these days but the name has stuck.   

So my garden has a literary name and as it happens I am a literary type of gardener.  One does not like to brag but it is a simple statement of fact that I can squeeze a Shakespeare quote out of a turnip. 

I frequently do.    

But  where are my manners?  Please sit down.  Not there.  That is the asparagus row, upon which I have just applied a generous truckload of –

Well, never mind.  I expect it will wash out. 

Of course the garden does not look like much now.  It has been winter, after all, my least favorite season.  One tries to embrace the now, as they say; but some nows are cuddlier than others and there is no point denying that in the Mystery Date lineup of seasons winter is not the Dreamboat type but perhaps his disappointing younger brother, the little runty one who breathes through his mouth and picks his nose at the dinner table.

Some people like winter but they tend to be the ones who also like shopping, and Christmas.  I’d rather be shot.  To us outdoorsy types, malls are sinister at the best of times.  Throw in holiday crowds, bell-ringers in Santa drag, and the Little Drummer Boy over the PA system and we find ourselves flopping on the tiles like salted slugs, our small, frightened eyes searching frantically for an exit sign.  Give us spring any day, and the kind of holiday that involves beer and sunshine. 

But I digress.  I was telling you about Bob’s Little Acre, my garden and by extension this feature, which is a gardening column.  Sort of.

I have always had a garden and I always will.  When I was a small, untidy child I doted excessively on dirt, my levels of happiness and filth in direct and dependent  proportion; and in the fullness of time I expect to be the kind of old woman who stumps through the garden in hip boots and housedress, booming out pronouncements like:

“There is nothing like llama excrement for the cultivation of really superior asparagus.”

(Yes, Gentle Reader, that, I fear, is the soil amendment in which you are currently nestled; but the llama as I understand it is a herbivore and as such the ultimate product of its rather complicated digestive system is of no particular olfactory unpleasantness.)        

As I was saying, I am no longer a dirty urchin nor yet a muddy crone, but rather somewhere in the middle, not old enough to cram my wisdom down the throats of the young, perhaps, but grown far too canny, thank you very much, to swallow the happy horse – er, the llama excrement routinely dealt out as accepted wisdom in the gardening world.

“Plant corn after all danger of frost is past, wearing a blue shirt,” say salesmen at hardware stores, whose only claim to horticultural expertise is the possession of overalls.

 “Young plants benefit greatly from a side-dressing of well-rotted sturgeon, which will correct any latent Ph imbalance,” write county extension agents, and get paid for it.

Ph, indeed!  Note how shiftily they throw the term out, when they are stuck for a topic, or caught in a lie.  Ph trumps every time because no one has the faintest idea what it may mean.

In fact, exposing the untruths so glibly perpetuated in conventional garden writing has become the abiding mission of Bob’s Little Acre.  The column does dispense useful horticultural information – sometimes – but at its ardently pulsing heart is the tenet that most of what we know about gardening, much less the universe, is lies and male answer syndrome.  Without outraging the confines of modesty I believe I may say that Bob’s Little Acre has become to the county extension agent what Woodward was to Nixon.

The other basic tenet of BLA is:  dirt.  People have accused the column of leaning this way or the other way or being for this or against that.  The truth of the matter is that BLA doesn’t lean one way or the other so much as it flops down and rolls, and if it has an agenda it is dirt every time.  Bob’s Little Acre is to dirt what Princess Grace was to breast-feeding.   

So.  Spring approaches, and with it the siren call of dirt.  I invite you to return to Bob’s Little Acre each week and roll with me.  I am happy for the company.  Only do stop brushing at your clothes.  As the old saying goes, stay out of the garden if you can’t stand the –

      On second thoughts, perhaps that is not the way the old saying goes at all.

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

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.