A Richer Dust: Wherein Bob Discusses Compost

This was one of the earlier Bobs, appearing in 2005.

A RICHER DUST

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

Shakespeare wrote:  “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

This is a gardening column and will, thus, not unduly burden itself in arguing whether men do, in fact, die for love, or women, for that matter – though we are remembering a movie called Lady Caroline Lamb in which the last line was the lady’s maid lamenting, “She died of a broken ‘eart!”  We were not unwilling, at that point, to bid Caroline adieu, having never taken to her in the first place and in any case having finished our popcorn .
No, what interests us is the worms.  When we place our kitchen waste outdoors, cover it tastefully with mulch, and submit it to the digestive processes of worms (who are, presumably, ravening impatiently about the garden in hope of amorous fatalities), it becomes compost, the crumbly black stuff that is to the organic gardener what gold was to the alchemist.

Composting has existed in nature for a couple of million years, anyway.  Trees shed their leaves, which decay, making the forest soil into beautiful, black, friable stuff that you would hook for your garden except for problems of transport and the fact that the rangers would nail you. 

Little creatures die and add their tiny carcasses to the organic mix.  Bigger creatures, too.  The poet Rupert Brooke wrote patriotically, and rather too prophetically, of his possible death in World War I:  “There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” – meaning Rupert, I’m afraid – “that is forever England.”

Dear me.  Here one has set out to discuss compost and one finds oneself not only frothing on about Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke but remembering that Lady Caroline was one of Lord Byron’s mistresses.  Well, if darling Rupert could write so romantically about being compost, surely we can permit ourselves to wax poetic about its virtues in the garden.

Most gardeners will agree that compost is superior to chemical fertilizers.  Not only does it add nutrients, it improves the texture of the soil.  Furthermore, compost costs nothing to make and it’s a convenient way to get rid of the salad from two weeks ago currently evolving into new life forms in the crisper.

Nor is there much disagreement about what to put into your compost pile:  All foodstuffs except meat, which is said to bring rodents.  So:  Coffee grounds, turnips you bought last January, the bread that is growing festive blue spots, the lentil loaf for which your family’s palate was insufficiently sophisticated.

Some materials take longer to compost than others.  Eggshells are so hardy one wonders at times how chickens get born.  And though some gardeners believe in composting paper coffee filters, we have found them dauntingly durable.  And peanut shells?  To expand upon our poetical theme:  Intimations of Immortality.

There is also consensus that layering your kitchen waste with mulch aids the composting process and that it keeps the compost area easier on the eye.  So:  Grass clippings, hay, leaves.  Throw a pile of autumn foliage on that yam casserole with the miniature marshmallows and forget that it ever happened.

Where there seems to be disagreement is how, precisely, to make compost.  Order one seed catalog and you will for the rest of your life find your mailbox crammed with ads for ingenious devices to manufacture “black gold.”  Wooden crates, wire mesh, bins made of square hay bales. One composter on the market consists of a barrel with air holes punched in it suspended between two poles, with a crank.  The idea is, you put your biodegradables in the barrel and every day you spin it around with the crank, looking smug and scientific.

We will, in the interest of honesty, admit that in our credulous youth we wanted one of these so bad we could taste it.  Not being able to afford it, we attempted to home-make a facsimile, consisting of a huge metal trashcan that we punctured with our Swiss Army knife, filled with rotting food, and then rolled around the yard, looking half-witted and vaguely inbred.  Result:  Well, we don’t imagine the expensive kind worked, either.

There are pundits who advise you to water your compost, turn your compost, buy additives for your compost.  Reading such stuff, we cannot imagine how these people find time to garden or hold down jobs.

In reality, we find that all one needs for composting is nature and Mr. Shakespeare’s worms.  Dump kitchen waste in a spot close to the garden, cover it with hay, repeat the process until the pile is a few feet high, then leave it for the worms to deal with.  You’ll have crumbly, wormy compost sooner or later, depending on the season. 

If you find yourself agitating it and watering it and buying it toys, it may be time to take up another hobby – cross-stitch, say, or writing poetry.

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

Boblet: Poop, The Sequel: An Addendum to The Sewer Opus

Poop:  The Sequel

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This is why you have a blog!  I was just bursting with things to say in this week’s Radio-Free Robin column about sewers (below), but no matter how tight a ball I rolled the universe into, I couldn’t squeeze in everything I had to say in my outside limit of 950 words.  So here, at no additional cost, is an addendum.

            I conceived the notion of writing such a column in the first place because I wanted to explain to news readers – assumin’ I’ve got some – why I keep raving on and on in the Sentinel about the county’s sewer projects as if they were the most important thing in the county:  They are. 

One of the major perks to being an underpaid, under-appreciated local news reporter is that, sitting in those county commission or tax or water board meetings that everybody else finds so boring, one really does sooner or later pick up an idea of how the world works.  And the world works on these boring concepts no one normal cares about, like you can’t have a lot of people living in one place without some way to handle the poop.

Then you’ve got the way communities pay for these things.  Most people understand the basic notion of taxes but I imagine they’d be astonished if they studied up on these bond issues.  Bond issues are basically the way governmental bodies borrow money for public projects.  But lately it looks to me like there’s a trend of doing it to back up private projects or in some cases just out-and-out pay for them.  I won’t carry on much more about that because I’d rather talk about poop, but I hope to God the water board is smarter than I am.

            Now.  Poop.

            One of the tenets I started out with was a linguistic revelation:  The presence in English of the words “hungry” and “thirsty” bears witness to the sad truth that people have sometimes not had enough to eat or drink.  But the absence of words denoting a need to do No. 1 or No. 2 attests just as eloquently to a more uninhibited history of toilet habits. 

Though there are of course adjectives etymologically related to these functions, they do not in fact describe a need to perform them; rather, they refer to abstract and largely negative qualities.  The obvious conclusion is that our ancestors never allowed pressure to build up long enough in those departments to require language referring to the frustrated need for relief, but went ahead and “went” wherever and whenever, whether alone or in company, possibly without interrupting their sentences.

Now, the second point I wanted to make:  You will note how increasingly Victorian the last couple of paragraphs became.  Please observe the progressive increase in syllables and the rather spinsterish use of the semicolon.  This tendency is due to the fact that I am a girl writer not a boy writer, and I am talking about poop.

Mr. W. Hodding Carter, who wrote the book my sewer column discusses, is a boy writer, and possibly boy writers should not be allowed to write about poop at all!  Bless their hearts, no matter how old boy writers get they still cannot seem to resist bathroom humor. 

            All of Carter’s lurid descriptions of the most luxurious new toilets and all of his tasteless references to “floaters” and the like I endured with some pain and will not perpetuate with further comment.  But I did plan to share Carter’s delving up of the ribald 16^th–century musings of Rabelais’s literary monster Gargantua, translated from the French, concerning his experiments on what to use in place of toilet paper, which, one gathers, had not yet been invented.

“Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman’s velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament,” the monster begins.  “Then a hood, and a neckerchief, then some earpieces of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them .. that it fetched all the skin off my tail with a vengeance.”

Gargantua raves on in this vein, and Carter faithfully follows him, for some pages.  He tries out a page’s cap and then a cat, which turns out rather worse than the spangles, and cures himself by next time using his mother’s gloves. 

“After that I wiped me with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade …with lettuce and with spinach leaves.”

I am just excerpting Carter’s excerpts of Rabelais here, mind you.  I am leaving out a lot and I expect he was, too.  “Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, on the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a tablecloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them.”

And on to the animal world:  “With a hen, with a rooster, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag ..” 

Finally, after pages and pages, he settles on the warm neck of a downy goose as being the optimum to his purpose.  Great stuff, and I really did plan to dress up my column with sprinkles of it (“with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey…”) but I just plain ran out of room, as I am doing here again.

But I cannot conclude without pointing out that, being a girl writer, I had never come across that bit of Rabelais even in my college years, though – for reasons I no longer remember – I am a girl writer who majored in French.  It just goes to highlight the fundamental differences between the sexes regarding certain delicate matters, and to underscore the wisdom of avoiding discussion of them in mixed company.

END

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance: Of Sewers and the Social Contract

This I wrote as a "Radio-Free Robin," or quasi-political column, not a Bob, for this week's Sentinel.

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance:  Of Sewers and the Social Contract

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Once I was looking at some artist’s conception of a Civil War battle, noble-looking generals on noble-looking horses in a green field under a blue sky, when suddenly it struck  me that, in real life, with that much cavalry the place must have been absolutely oozing in horse poop.

That’s an unromantic view of history but not a patch on what you will find if you read, as I just did, W. Hodding Carter’s book Flushed:  How the Plumber Saved Civilization.  Carter’s portrait of Western society before modern sanitation oozes with a different species of poop altogether.

How did your narrator, a garden writer so Victorian she refers to herself in the first-person plural, become involved in the study of what I’m pretty sure her garden writer avatar would refer to as “a certain unbeautiful substance that is, however, useful in horticulture as a soil amendment?”

Well, anyone who reads the front page of this newspaper will remember that in Dade County we have two ongoing water board issues, Canyon Ridge and Brow Wood, that are enough to keep a local news reporter’s mind firmly in the sewer. 

But it’s more than that. 

People sometimes ask how I stay awake covering county commission meetings.  They’re missing the glaring truth:  Local government is the nuts and bolts of democracy.

Similarly, waste management is the most basic requirement of collective living, which is to say why people consent to be governed in the first place.  These tea partiers who bellow they want government out of their lives, what do you suppose they’d be bellowing if there were fluids swirling around their ankles more objectionable than, say, tea? 

My guess is it would be something along the lines of, “There oughta be a law,” or “Help!” notwithstanding the absence in the Constitution of a single word pertaining to poop. 

In the country, of course, we take care of these matters ourselves, latterly with privately-owned septic tanks, formerly with more rustic accommodations.  Really, depending on how far one lives from one’s neighbors, one could get away with nothing at all, though I must say my own apertures seal shut with a little noise – snap! – as I type the words.

But when people gather in greater concentrations, poop looms larger as a social issue, as Hodding Carter’s book shows us, sparing few details.  To begin with, what, pray tell, do you suppose castle moats were really for?

Yes.  Moats were circular cesspits, and if you swam one to rescue a fair princess you’d probably die of a disease before you got across.  (And if you did get there, she’d probably say “Ick!” and push you back in.)

But cities were much, much worse.  In Paris, householders would empty their bedpans into the streets with the thoughtful if euphemistic warning, “Gardez, l’eau!”  (“Watch it, water!”)  In London, the warning was anglicized to “gardy-loo” and is possibly the reason the English still call a bathroom a loo. 

But this was Western civilization, home of the free market, and it wasn’t long before the trade of “nightman” or “gongfermor” arose to make a buck off the situation.  These nocturnal entrepreneurs collected the unbeautiful substance – which came to be called “nightsoil” – and carted it out to the country to sell to farmers as a soil amendment.

As London grew, there were more people and more “nightsoil.”  Cesspits were built and overflowed, and eventually it seemed sensible to cover up the streams and rivers, build houses on top of them and dump raw sewage into the water.

Result:  an unbelievably polluted Thames, a tainted drinking water supply, cholera epidemics, infant mortality approaching 50 percent – and in 1846 the covered Fleet River exploded from methane buildup, taking three houses with it.

Advocates for the poor had been demanding that the government do something since the 1820s, but the English autocrats didn’t act until they were affected personally.  It was the Great Stink of 1858, when the air in Parliament made members vomit, not the cholera pandemic of 1849 that decimated the population, that finally kick-started London’s sanitation push.

            Now let’s move across the globe to Asia, where the great Ganges –

(Here I cannot help telling you that when I came across the word “Ganges” in a crossword puzzle and asked my husband about it, he male-answered without pausing for thought that it was an embarrassing health condition, as in:  “My Ganges is swoll up so bad, I cain’t hardly zip up my britches.”)

– where the great Ganges, the sacred river of India, is more full of poop than a family-values Republican with a mistress in Argentina.  But the lack of sanitation is more than just a disease vector in India; it is also the instrument of social injustice.  How do you suppose the Untouchables got to be untouchable?

Yes:  Poop.  Someone was needed to carry it out of the crowded villages, and thus the caste was born – a caste that was to be treated with shocking unfairness throughout the millennia because of the despised labor forced upon it. 

The Indians are even now working on this problem, and Carter quoted Prime Minister Nehru as saying: “The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”

In Dade County, sewers are seen as the key to growth, attracting not just new residents but desperately needed industry.  The question is not whether they’re necessary but who will pay for them, and the answers proposed may strike you as being full of a certain unbeautiful substance useful in horticulture as a soil amendment.

A humble substance indeed, but one which seems, nevertheless, to be at the very heart of the Social Contract.

END

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

Every Color But Blue: Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

Every Color But Blue:  Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Plant zinnias.”

            That’s what I told the unhappy woman.  Then I got into my car and drove off into the twilight, lips blue with shock.  How had it happened?

I had just given advice.

            I don’t give advice!  Certainly not the horticultural variety, on the principle that nobody would take it.  Why should they?  Virtually nothing you find in newspaper gardening sections these days is useful, entertaining or, not to put too fine a point on it, true. 

You get the idea the editor says, “So write 700 words on petunias,” and the writer says, “So what’s a petunia?”  And the editor says, “So I look like I know what’s a petunia?  But if it’s something you eat run a recipe.”

In such an environment if I choose to squander my allotted column-inches on beer, Shakespeare and the human condition, I figure I am anyway doing no harm.  But back to those zinnias.

I had recommended them not horticulturally but medicinally.  The woman seemed depressed, and I had given her a suggestion on how to be happier.

Me?

Though I claim no expertise in either field, it could be argued I know more about horticulture than happiness.  You might go so far as to say I know more about Mesolithic marsupials (if any existed).  Not to beat it to death, but I am not just a  “The glass is half empty” type, I am a “The glass has been sucked into the yawning abyss of my despair” type.

But as detailed in one of the “Boblets” I have begun posting on the Bob’s Little Acre blog, during a recent period of intense misery I read a self-help manual on happiness, drank the Kool-Aid,  and have since been earnestly trying to mend my Black Hole ways. 
Resolutions and mantras sift from my desk and dangle off my bulletin board. (“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”) (“Be nice to people.  Mostly.”)  I march through life with a determined smile, militantly searching for the good in others.  I’ll shake it out of them if I have to.

For my cell phone ring tone I selected “Nature,” which sounds like the cinematic effect you’d hear when the fairy godmother descends in a soap bubble to wave her wand.  Birds chirp.  Chimes tinkle.  My husband says all that’s missing is a high, piping voice announcing, “Somebody’s callin’ to say they love you!”

            And the odd thing is, I really have been happy.  Like last Sunday I worked like a field hand from the minute I woke up until past midnight, weeding flowerbeds, mowing my continent-like lawn, canning 12 quarts of tomatoes. 

At the end of the day I was covered with sweat, dirt and grass.  I’d scalded all 10 fingers and gotten poison ivy between the left ones.  But as I crawled into bed, too exhausted to read, I thought: “It don’t get no better than this, Earl.” 

What’s my secret?  Well, all right.  Beer may have played some tiny role.  I have never made any secret that to mow the lawn you need more yellow fluids than gasoline.  But that’s not really it.  I’m at a level of bubbly that can’t be accounted for by malt fermentation. 

You might postulate it’s because summer is my season by birthright; I was born in August and, FYI, I’ll be blowing out some candles this week.

But way too many!  Past, say, 40, birthdays seriously suck.  Why celebrate a process that makes our butt sag, our belly billow and hair grow out of our rapidly multiplying chins?  You might as well dedicate a holiday to methamphetamine, or leprosy.

            So probably I should be depressed by this reminder that my brief hour of youth and beauty, such as it was, has dwindled further into the murky past.  Instead, I’ve been so perky lately I’ve wondered:  Is there still time to try out for cheerleading? 

Is my sunny mood owing to the self-help book? the mantras?  the ring tone?  Maybe a little.  But I think what really does the trick is:

            Flowers.

            Ten years ago I bought a rose of Sharon with big double purple blooms.   Shortly afterwards, I discovered how to root out new plants from cuttings and thus began my Mad Scientist phase.   Alternately speaking in a Royal-Society accent (“May I take a cutting, sir, for purposes of vegetative propagation?”) or a Dr. Frankenstein one (“Ve make der big vuns into der little vuns, but vurst ve have to cut zem op.  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!”) I proceeded to cover every bare spot with rose of Sharon clones. 

So now, every August I’m surrounded by oceans of big double flowers, to the point that struggle as I might I float helplessly off in a tide of horticultural bliss.  For persons of a botanical bent, no case of the blues can withstand that amount of purple.

But even if you were not sensible enough to go postal years ago with scissors and rooting hormone, it’s not too late to perk yourself up with flowers.  I have planted zinnias on my birthday several years and seen them bloom before frost.

Zinnias are round, double and easy to grow.  Their colloquial name is Old Maids but they always remind me of those tall, cheerful country girls who wear a lot of makeup and marry early and often.  A seed packet will run you maybe a quarter and keep you the rest of your life, as they self-seed relentlessly.

Zinnias come tall or as dwarves and, significantly, in every color but blue.  

So if August finds you, like me, with your personal life in tatters, your professional life a shambles and your fingers swollen with poison ivy, flowers help!  So I feel impelled to tell you:

“Plant zinnias.”

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

Which One Are You? An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

            This is one of the fabled “Boblets,” which I’m beginning to realize are not necessarily going to be shorter than bona fide Bobs.  You think it’s easy rolling the universe into a ball?  Maybe later I’ll condense this a bit and make it into a newspaper piece, but for right now I had something to say about happiness and wanted to say it.

Which One Are You?  An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

            I looked that up and it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln.  That’s a shame, because I’ve always had a soft spot for Abe.  I’d thought it was by Henry Ford and that was fine with me because from the history he already sounded like a jerk.

The quote presumes if you’re unhappy it must be your own fault, and that’s what makes my butt hurt.  Who wouldn’t rather be happy?  You think I like sitting down here in the garden eating worms and sucking entire galaxies into the abyss of my despair?

That’s an exaggeration.  I’m not always a black hole.  Just mostly.  Sometimes I find myself singing on a Saturday morning and realize I’m happy for no reason other than it’s Saturday morning.  But my default mood is a kind of Ain’t-Complainin’ neutral, shifting down toward glum or up toward cheerful depending on circumstances, health and relative humidity. 

Anyway I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought that hard about happiness before, but this has been an awful, awful year and I needed help.  Thus it was that I recently found myself reading a bestseller called The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, a sort of how-to manual on joy.

            I started reading the book with my accustomed negativity.  The first chapter seemed to be mostly about closets.  Hello?  I acknowledge that a reasonable level of tidiness, varying according to individual taste, is necessary for comfort, but how much ecstasy can a woman hope to achieve from a really organized closet?

            That’s the thing about these self-help books, they always mix the homely with the profound.  I remember reading one by the great and fluffy Helen Gurley Brown that admonished you to cherish your friends, because the people who love you are your most precious resource; and to keep rinsing until all of the shampoo is out of your hair.

            Ms. Rubin, though layers less fluffy, deals out similar mixtures:  “Do good, feel good” is side by side with “Bring a sweater.”

            But as I read on I began to understand the practicality of this sort of advice.  Her point about the sweater is that it’s impossible to be happy when you’re freezing.  Physical misery is one of the more basic deterrents to happiness. 

I have noticed this about shoes and certain items of underwear.  I bought a pair of black high heels with adorable little bows during one of my girlier moments.  They’re beautiful but they hurt, and not one day I’ve worn them has been anything less than tragic.  Similarly, some of my unhappiest business days have ended with me thrashing around at traffic lights trying to liberate myself from bras, which are instruments of torture left over from a barbaric past that also brought us the hair shirt and Spanish Inquisition. 

Anyway, physical comfort does contribute to happiness, and the book is full of useful pointers like that.  Take variety:  We think we like it more than we actually do.  If you were to stock up on two weeks’ worth of snacks you might buy everything from burritos to stuffed mushrooms, but if you go to the store each afternoon for something to eat you will almost always come out unwrapping the same Moon Pie. 

The point is, it may well improve your happiness to allow yourself to return from your next shopping trip with eight identical black tank tops if that’s what you wear every day.  Anyone who has ever had a psychotic episode in the light fixture aisle of Home Depot can tell you about the anxiety of too much choice.

Ms. Rubin also urges you to reexamine your basic beliefs – which she calls heuristics or True Rules – not so much to discard the ones that aren’t true as to modify the ones that don’t contribute to happiness.  For example, one of her husband’s – “The first one is not the right one” – is a keeper, she says, because though it’s probably not true it’s a comforting thing to say to a friend who has just been turned down for a job.

            I thought about my own heuristics and was sourly amused to find that most of them had to do with food:  “You can’t unsalt,” and “The only way to win at Captain D’s is not to go in.”  (I stand by that one.)

            I did reframe one of my nongastronomic heuristics to contribute to happiness.  Old:  Everyone hates me because of my vile personality.  New:  Everyone hates me because they envy my fascinating life.  What does it matter which is true?  Now every time another friend dumps me I just clamp my eyes shut and chant:  “Livin’ the dream!”

            Anyway, the most important point of the book was not these little tricks but the idea that happiness is, too, at least partly a matter of will.  One of the tenets of the book is:  “Act like you want to feel.”

            Of course you can’t be happy just by deciding to, but Ms. Rubin says it’s not a bad start; even faking a laugh or forcing a smile for some reason raises the spirits – and then of course you can always try her little tricks.

            Furthermore, she points out, happiness is the socially conscious choice:  Happy people make others happy, whereas unhappy people drag others down.    

I thought about that and it’s true.  I know slightly a young man who’s always happy whatever his circumstances and, rather better, another who’s always miserable.  The train wreck is smarter and funnier and really I like him more, but at worst he says something mean I have to forgive him for (because he’s unhappy) and at best he’s so gloomy I do somersaults to cheer him up.  So it’s actually less work talking to the dumb guy.

So Ms. Rubin’s stance is that pursuing happiness is not just our constitutional right, it’s a virtue.  She cites the case of a young French nun, St. Therese of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925 for little more than what sounded like Extreme Perkiness.  She didn’t lead any armies or get crucified upside down.  She was just real, real cheerful.

One happiness trick Ms. Rubin recommends is reading disaster accounts – you know, the kind of memoir that begins, “I’ll never forget the day I was diagnosed.”  The idea is, they make you feel grateful it isn’t happening to you, and grateful people are happier.

I can attest to that because of the tornados that tore through here in April.  People whose houses were left standing almost universally used the word “blessed” to describe their feelings.  That included me.  In fact, I felt so blessed I didn’t start to whine until precisely the sixth day without electricity or flush toilets.  (That was the day it rained on me while I was burying rotting chicken from the freezer in the front flowerbed.)

But the point was brought home to me more vividly a couple of weeks ago when my husband told me about a fender-bender he’d had on the way to work.  He’d been following too close, he admitted, and when his cell phone rang he rear-ended the car in front of him while he fumbled to answer it.

My husband didn’t think he’d done that much damage but of course he stopped and so did the car in front of him.  The other driver got out and my husband, who had seen from behind that he was very short, now realized he was a dwarf.  The guy walked around his car and all he said was, “I’m not happy.”

“So,” my husband concluded, “I asked him, ‘Which one are you, then?’ ”

Get it?  The Seven Dwarves?  My husband hadn’t had an accident at all, it was just some crap joke he’d read on Facebook.   We were dressed up to go out to dinner and I laughed so hard I cried off all my eye makeup. 

It was only later I realized it wasn’t that damn funny.  I had just been easy to please because the last time my husband admitted he’d followed too close it had cost us $700.

            So.  I’ll conclude by recommending the book, and admitting I’m a convert to this happiness thing myself.  Maybe I’m not genetically predisposed to perkiness, and maybe some rotten things have happened to me in the past year.  But I can anyway try.  

Since the job is open, maybe I’ll be Happy.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays happily in the dirt.  More or less. 

The Gardener and the Market: How Radishes Started Civilization, Or Something

            For out-of-town readers (if I’ve got any):  The Trenton Ingle’s Market was damaged in the April 27 tornados that ravaged our area.  Rumors abound about why it has still not reopened – it rents the space from Soloff, a big shopping-center realty concern, and Soloff ain’t sayin’ either.  But its absence is driving everybody in town nuts.  Or at least your narrator.  One of the only two competitors costs too much, and I’m still mad at them about a chocolate chip cookie in 2009; and the other prominently features preformed yam patties in the meat section.  I ask you.

The Gardener and the Market:  How Radishes Started Civilization, or Something

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You hear a lot of nonsense about how it all began.

Religious people will tell you that everything was made fresh and clean in a matter of days, and scientific ones will bend your ear about fish slowly growing legs and monkeys developing thumbs, leading to an increased ability to manipulate tools and, ultimately, beer cans. 

I’ll tell you what it really was:  It was radishes.

I know this because my neighbors grew radishes one year and gave me a bushel.  I thought it was nice of them at the time but radish by radish I realized it had been an act of desperation. 

See, tomatoes you can can and green beans you can freeze, but the only thing you can do with radishes is eat them until your insides commence to combust spontaneously.  That pleasant peppery little zip they have turns on you after the first dozen or so, blows you up like swamp gas and makes it feel like you are practicing for Hell.

            And then there’s lettuce. 

Lettuce is even more perishable in the garden than it is in the crisper, so during the growing season it’s hard to walk down the road without some hollow-eyed gardener body-slamming you and begging you to take some before it goes to seed.  They call that process  “bolting,” which I find apt because most of your trouble growing lettuce is chasing down people to eat it.

            And what of zucchini?

Zucchini is a vegetable that takes over whole neighborhoods, proliferating furtively beneath its spreading foliage and militantly resisting any effort to control its throbbing Italian fecundity.  Gardeners pushing zucchini tend to be needier even than your radish crowd.

What, then, could be more natural than that these overburdened growers should come together for the mutual good?  That they should develop a system of exchange to ease surfeits and supply deficits?  That someone should take advantage of the crowd and sell hot dogs? 

Thus it was, at the dewy dawn of time, that gardeners unwittingly created the concept of the Market, and thence civilization.

I have mixed feelings about that. 

See, the thing got out of control.  We started turning everything from food to finer feelings into a market commodity.  Hungry?  Buy a burger.  Feel bad?  Buy some pills.  In love?  Buy a ring.  When I was young (she said coyly), that was not the effect that followed that cause. 

            I have a friend who instead of antiperspirant uses a salt stick she gets at a health food store.  The light film of minerals allows you to sweat but mitigates the odor.  My friend uses it because she worries that antiperspirants contribute to breast cancer.

            I wasn’t sure I believed that – what’s the FDA for if not to protect us from products that kill us? – but I decided to err on the side of caution and bought a salt stick myself. 

Then recently I realized I’d had the same one over a year and not much of it was used up yet.  The part that’s gone is mostly through attrition, which is to say dropping it on the bathroom floor.  So it may be around to pass on to my heirs.

            And thinking that, I found myself suddenly believing my friend’s theory.  The Market works best with commodities you use once and throw away, like toilet paper.  What would happen to America if people bought deodorant only once in a lifetime? 

So tumors schmumors, antiperspirant, and the Market, must roll on!   And if you don’t believe FDA allows products that kill people, just look at the diseases that processed food has visited on America’s children.

This past year has been my annus horribilis – that means “horrible year,” by the way, and is not a lead-in to anything else I have to say about toilet paper – but if no other good has come of it, it has showed how little gardens need have with the Market.   

As I dogpaddled morosely around my sea of troubles this spring, basil volunteered from  self-seeding, parsley and sage from roots.  Potato plants sprang from spuds I’d missed harvesting last year.  Eating-size asparagus grew up beside the porch steps and down by the mailbox, ostensibly through spontaneous generation. 

And flowers?  Cleome appeared magically in a spot where I’d grown it several years ago, and in the front border petunias were blooming before I’d quite realized they were even capable of self-seeding.  These are simpler blossoms than the big flashy doubles I had there last year but the colors are beautiful and I love them.    

So when my horticultural fervor finally kicked back in, it was simply a matter of rolling around in the dirt liberating the plants from weeds, neatly illustrating the one overriding message of Bob’s Little Acre:  Gardening is something you do, not something you buy.  

Yes, when I moved here from the big city many years ago, I did so with the idea of escaping the Market.  I wanted to twine flowers in my hair and grow all my own food. 

But when you live at the anal end of nowhere, and work at home, it’s not long before you figure out that the Ingle’s is 75 percent of your social life, and anyway you can’t grow toilet paper.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this column:  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT INGLE’S?  EVERYTHING I NEED, ONE OF THE OTHER GROCERY STORES CHARGES DOUBLE FOR AND THE OTHER DOESN’T CARRY!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!

Ahem.  What I meant to say was, as a nation we must wean ourselves from our pernicious dependency on the Market, in favor of the steely self-reliance of our frontier forefathers.

And above all, we must not plant radishes.

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