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

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

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

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It’s not just media hype.

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

Pandemic.

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

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

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

It was slugs. 

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

Whine Flu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eek,” says my Inner Girl.

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us naturally to the subject of bears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the human condition.

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

Wealth. Poverty. Asparagus.

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

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

By Robin Ford Wallace

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

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

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

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

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

SPLAT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPLAT! 

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

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

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

SPLAT!

END

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

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