Radio-Free Robin: Don't Help the Bear!

     This is a column for this week's Sentinel I wrote not as a Bob's Little Acre but as a Radio-Free Robin, which means it's what passes at the Acre for political.  It's not necessarily artful but I had to be rid of it!  It's spring and time for people of my proclivities to roll happily in the dirt.  This afternoon I was trying to do just that but I had this piece to finish before deadline and this point I wanted to make about the Current Situation on my beady little mind, so instead of rejoicing in dirt I kept furrowing the brow and moving the lips as I formulated arguments.
     And really, after I ruined my Sunday for the piece, what boots it?  Do I change anybody's mind?  Do I strike any real blows for Truth, Justice and the American Way? 
     Well, who knows?  But I promise, I'm through with these Radio-Frees for the rest of the spring anyway.  The next Bob, which I've already started, will be about asparagus.
     Well, sort of about asparagus.  Mostly about asparagus.  Though there were some points I wanted to make about materialism and poverty and Truth, Justice, the American ...
     Later.

Kiss the Girl!  Have Some Kids!  But Above All, Don’t Help The Bear!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “There once was a farmer who took a young miss, in back of the barn where he gave her a –

Lecture, on horses and cattle and chickens and eggs, and told her she had the most beautiful –

Manners, which suited a girl of her charms, a girl that he wanted to take in his –

Washing, and ironing, and then when she did, they could get married and raise lots of –

Sweet Violets!”  

            In case you’re wondering, the above is a song called “Sweet Violets” that my mom used to sing me when I was a child, and one reason I never reproduced.  Think of the awful power of mothers to warp their children for life. 

Oh, you wouldn’t mean any harm.  You’d just be trying to get your kid to sleep.  But there you’d be at 3 a.m., slumped against a wall jiggling away, when suddenly you’d realize what you’d done:  Infected your innocent baby with all the words to “Honey,” which would haunt him for the next 90 years.

But weren’t we talking about the stark and terrifying socioeconomic realities of the early 21^st century?

Yes, I fear so, Gentle Reader:  Radio-Free Robin rides again! 

Don’t look at me like that.  You think I want to editorialize?  It is spring, when a girl like me is already torn between the siren call of dirt and the more winsome melody of wildflowers.  You think I got time to watchdog our cherished American freedoms? 

However, keeping the world safe for democracy gets to be a habit, and it was not for “Sweet Violets” that I was delving through the spidery attics of my memory.  “Sweet Violets” just seduced me from my grim duty momentarily, being about flowers.  What I was really looking for up there was a song my mother used to sing about a preacher chased up a tree by a bear.  He prays:  

              "Oh, Lawd!  You delivered Daniel from the lion's den.  

              You delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale and then,

              The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, so the good book do declare,  

              Now Lawd, dear Lawd, if you can't help me,

              Please!  Don’t help that bear!”

              What got me singing that was a speech by newly elected Labor Commissioner Mark Butler.  Mr. Butler expressed regret for the Labor Department’s reputation of hostility toward the business sector, and vowed to make it more business-friendly from now on.  “I don’t think the Department of Labor should be about handing out checks,” he said.

              You realize, of course, he was talking about unemployment checks?  

              So the new labor commissioner is against taking care of axed workers, on the grounds it might irritate business, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard this.  Here’s the thinking:  

              With millions of Americans out of work, job creation has become our national holy grail.  And who creates jobs?  Why, business!  And business could create a whole bunch more if it weren’t for all these pesky government regulations!  “We need to get government out of the way,” I heard (also newly elected) U.S. Congressman Tom Graves say in a speech on job creation.

              Ahem.  Does anybody besides me remember who it was who shipped American jobs overseas because overseas workers work cheaper?  Who eliminated jobs in favor of outsourced consultants so it wouldn’t have to pay for health insurance?  (And don’t even get me started on health insurance!)

              Business did those things, of course.  It is ridiculous to hope that business will save the American worker.  Business doesn’t care about the American worker.  Business used to send coal miners into dank pits where they died like flies.  Business still does that as far as it can get away with it.  

              In fact, business has always treated workers as badly as it was allowed.  Remember, please, the company store, where business clipped workers of what little wages it was obliged to pay them.  For that matter, business used to capture people in poor countries and sell them to other businesses so they wouldn’t have to pay wages at all.  Business still adores slave labor and that’s why it recruits illegal aliens.  

              And business never even pretended it was a good guy.  Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business,” but who ever said the business of business was America?  Business never made any bones it was doing anything but trying to make a buck.

              Now, Point Two:  It is a legitimate – a vital! – function of government to protect American workers from the greed and rapacity of business.  If it weren’t for government regulation, business would still be cheerfully boiling workers down in lard vats and beating little children to make them operate machines faster.  

              But now, when the greed of business has not only outsourced the jobs but collapsed the banking system and more or less obliterated the American middle class, when working Americans are fixin’ to become nothing but a pool of disenfranchised organ donors for the very rich, what does the great toothless voice of tea party populism shriek?

              “Keep the government out of business’s hair!  Abolish the minimum wage!  Dismantle collective bargaining!”   

              It is like my mother’s violet song, when the rhyme scheme suggests the farmer is going to kiss the girl and instead he commences to carry on about chickens.  If the world made sense, we wouldn’t elect candidates who said things like that, we’d swarm over them like Zulus and cut them up for meat.     

              What I’m trying to say here is that I am perfectly happy for the government to intercede in my behalf to keep rampageous capitalism from harvesting my bone marrow.  And if it won’t, all I can hope is:

              It won’t help the bear.

END 

The Gardener as Guerilla: They'll Never Take Me Alive!

       This is a "classic" Bob in the modern sense of the word, which if you haven't noticed now means "old as God."  But it's one of my faves and it was with surprise I noticed it wasn't on this blog.  It's a propos because this year, even though it's spring and I'm ravenin' for the dirt, between saving the world for democracy and financial stuff I'm having a hard time finding time to garden, much less write about it.  So some mornings I find myself simply aching for some time off, or an automatic weapon.  Anyway, I decided to post this old Bob on here as opposed to, say, writing a new one ...  

THEY’LL NEVER TAKE US ALIVE!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Spring, and we are hunkered down at Bob’s Little Acre, trowel in one hand, machinegun in the other, cigar clenched between our gritted teeth not because we like it but because we woke up in one of those Che Guevara moods you get sometimes when the Feds are after you.

            We are under siege.

            As we write, this place is surrounded by armed goons from the Health Department who are trying to shut us down, and IRS hitmen lurk by our mailbox.  A pity, because we had hoped to plant clematis down there, but that can wait.  Our hands are already pretty full what with setting out our tomatoes and starting our petunia border, to say nothing of the machinegun.

Which we wave defiantly at the T-men as, eyes squinting through cigar smoke, we determinedly pat a Purple Pirouette into place.  The Feds can wait, too, along with all the other creditors whose unopened bills clog our desk.  So can the piles of laundry that choke the house, clean and dirty becoming indistinguishable as passing cats use them for bedding, or worse. 

Not to mention the greasy dishes, the ominous black mold that threatens to engulf the bathroom, and the hungry-eyed man who keeps bleating about supper every time we go into the kitchen for another beer.  

And especially, with a cherry on top and twice on Sunday, the people who annoy us with phone calls whining about when we plan to show up at work.

            It is April!  The sun shines.  The birds sing.  The air is like wine.  The earth calls and we must obey its primordial summons.  We must plant.  We must hoe.  We must get down in the dirt and roll!

Spring is clearly a time meant for gardeners to garden.  We wait all winter for it, we dream of it through the frozen nights, and when it finally comes it hits us so hard that we lie on the ground and twitch.  Then up we get, trowel in hand, madness in our eyes, and head for the mud.  It is unnatural, nay, obscene, that we should do anything else. 

Yet the cruel world makes its nasty little demands of us just as if it were still winter.  Pay your bills!  Do your job!  File your tax return!  This place is a dump!  Aren’t we ever going to eat?

 Si, Senor, we say from behind our cigar.  As soon as you pry this trowel from our cold, dead fingers.

            The guerilla war that has us juggling seed peas and automatic weapons is caused by modern America’s sad failure to grasp the exigencies of the natural world on those of us who remain connected to it.  Spring screams to the gardener:  Carpe diem!  Seize the day and suck the juice out of it before it slips away! 

But to normal, virtuous Americans, Nature is the 30 seconds spent between house and car, car and office, and their only response to its wild siren call is to say something like, “Nice day.”

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, says virtuous America primly, whereas we gardeners are happiest caked with filth.  Render unto Caesar, we are told, when to go inside and fill out a form would kill us.  But at this time of year, the American virtue that makes us bite most savagely into our cigar is the Protestant work ethic.

We believe in the dignity of labor.  Oh, from time to time we may have made our little joke about work being the curse of the drinking classes.  We may have observed that, with spring for planting, summer so hot, fall for canning and winter taken up by seasonal adjustment disorder, the only time we have work is a couple of rainy Tuesdays in February.

However, we are not under the delusion that the world owes us a living and we are painfully aware that no one saw fit to set us up a trust fund.  We have resigned ourselves to toiling for our bread like the rest of virtuous America, though without visible enthusiasm.

But this is spring.

As our blood responds wildly to the rising sap, as the diems become exponentially more carpable, we are increasingly inclined to tell virtuous America, and our boss, where to stick it.

Taxes are for the little people, we shriek.  Cleanliness is for the stupid!  Work is for those with no hobbies!  If you’re hungry, open a can of soup!

Anyway, we are not talking full-frontal, X-rated diem-carping here.  We are talking about getting the lettuce in before it turns off hot.  So why can’t everybody just leave us alone?  We are decent, law-abiding, conscientious.  We will clean our house, pay our taxes, feed our family.  We will even go to work, sullenly, for a couple of hours.

The next time it rains.

These arguments, clear as they are, have never cut any ice with employers or the government, and we are still expected to meet work requirements, tax deadlines, and basic standards of cleanliness, whatever the season. 

That’s why those of us who are serious about horticulture must learn to accept the machinegun as a necessary and useful gardening implement, though frankly we are getting a little sick of the cigar.

END

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

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.

Bob Jumps Ship!

            Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to my attention it is spring.  Therefore, I regret to inform you that you are on your own.

            All winter I have been tirelessly exposing corruption, undermining tyranny and battling the various nefarious forces that constantly threaten our cherished American freedoms.  But folks, keeping the world safe for democracy seriously eats into a girl’s time.

            Just yesterday, I noticed that spring beauty was blooming in stripy pink profusion everywhere I essayed to place my dainty foot.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  Spring beauty is not a particularly early wildflower.  What had happened to the first harbingers of the season?

            This is when I noticed – to my shock and horror – that the Bradford pears were turning green.  I hadn’t gotten used to their blooming yet!  I’d been planning to write a Bob’s Little Acre about them, but by the time I got home to the computer they’d be gone entirely.  What was happening here? 

            What was happening was that while I was chasing nooz, spring had happened without me!  I’d been waiting for it for MONTHS, and then when it finally came around I was off promulgating the free and unfettered flow of information upon which Western-style democracy depends.  It was like missing your wedding because you’d been counting train cars.

            Well, I’ve had it!  Please remember that I came to crusadin’ journalism via the garden page.  No matter how many lives depend upon my steely-eyed vigilance, no matter how many representative governments topple in favor of tyranny, I can no longer ignore the siren call of dirt!              Somehow, the world must survive without me!

            Until next week.

            This is a long-winded way, Gentle Reader, of saying I’m on vacation.  So I beg of you, if evil looms, if autocracy burgeons, if injustice twirls its greasy mustachios –

            Call the cops or something.  And in the meantime, here are some nice pictures of wildflowers we saw yesterday at Sitton’s Gulch.



Hepatica




Cutleaf Toothwort





Blue Hepatica



Spring Beauty



Trillium



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