I have a new dress to wear in my favorite blue–royal. And I have new patent leather Mary Janes. I can’t wait to get dressed and make my big entrance.

That’s how I feel right now–except the shoes are my new high-top workboots, with easy zip entry, and my biggest worry is whether the pruning shears packed in my bags will bring down the wrath of Homeland Security on my head.

I’m traveling to the wilds of north central California to for a mini-farm training at the ranch founded by one of my heroes, John Jeavons–he of How to Grow More Vegetables fame. The idea is you’ll learn how to grow all the food you need to feed your family for a year on one acre of land–you know, the stuff my grandmother knew how to do, that my mother knows how to do, but is too ill and infirm to teach me.

I could be working. I’ve graded a set of papers… I should be uploading the results online… but I’m just too restless, too distracted, too … wiggly to sit still for it.

Stay tuned … There will be blogging from the road…

The things I care about seem so obvious to me–and yet so unimportant to my own family members and most of the people I know. My struggle with industrial food, for example … Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what I’m doing, why it matters to me, why, with the meager means at my disposal, I keep tilting at this vast, impersonal windmill.

The feeling was only exacerbated by what I did on my summer vacation.

I spent a chunk of July helping a friend of twenty years move from Tacoma, Wash., to Killeen, Texas. And contrary to popular belief–and the weather reports–this was a good move for her.

After two years of journalism headlines about historic layoffs and shuttered newspapers, this friend became the only person out of all my writerly acquaintance to actually obtain a print journalism job after being laid off–and not just any job but one that was better by a quantum leap than the one she had before.

Then, too, there was the added bonus that the move became the occasion for an almost Homeric road trip. Oh, what big fun–what an adventure–that was.

To leave Tacoma, we in effect turned our backs on Mt. Rainier and the dollhouse communities of arts-and-crafts bungalows around Puget Sound to head first north then south and east through the blessedly cool, moist Cascades … We climbed toward  Mt. Davis, through the Snoqualmie Pass, passing cornflower blue lakes and snow-capped peaks … in July!

How shocking it all seemed after a month of near drought amid central Virginia’s red clay hills. And I was even more surprised, once we hit southeastern Washington, to find myself surrounded by something surprisingly like high desert: an arid country, almost innocent of grass, alternating with trees only where the rivers flowed.

The interstates followed the old Oregon Trail route as we continued east and south. At a rest stop on the banks of the Columbia River (!) I found myself thinking of my Albemarle County neighbors, Lewis and Clark, and how strangely our paths were intersecting so many miles from Virginia, so many scores of years after they first set out to map the continent. How lush and abundant the continent had seemed to them then–an endless resource. And how different it all is today…

More of this kind of reflection was to come–it was, in some ways, the point of the trip, which we’d designed so that we could ditch the interstate south of Salt Lake City and wend our way through national parks and Indian lands to sights we had never seen and were likely never to have the chance to see again …

Anyway, we knew we were headed for desert, so we treasured the flush of green along the roadsides as we drove south from the Oregon state line through Pendleton, LaGrande–still roughly following the Lewis and Clark route. But south of Baker City, things dried out for good and, all the way into Idaho and beyond, I became more and more aware that the vast fields of wheat and potatoes we passed were kept going … by mechanical means.

And that was just the part we could see–the irrigators, that is, standing like sentries in the fields waiting for marching orders. What we couldn’t see, but that I knew to be there as surely as I know what’s really in the Cornflakes sold at the rate of 10 boxes for 10 dollars at Kroger, were the “inputs”: the genetically modified seeds engineered for resistance to who knows what, the fertilizers whose runoff poisons the rivers on which so much life in the West depends, the pesticides without which those vast monocultures of grain cannot survive, without which they’d simply be eaten to the ground …

There may be something like the West for scale–Australia, I’m thinking–but there’s nothing where I come from like the vast fields we passed, in which  wheat ears glittered–for miles–like bronze waves on a  sun-splashed sea.

Yea, verily, we have corn in the Southeast–but this corn, “knee high by the 4th of July” as in the old adage, undulated across the hilltops as far as the eye could see. And the eye can see plenty far in those parts.

Nor is there  anything in the Southeast–at least not for the past 50 years in the parts I call home–like the scars on the land. The recently harvested fields, which looked like the Sahara–or Mars–blowing thick drifts of dust into the breeze in every direction. The erosion gullies, open wounds in the hillsides suppurating topsoil.

Just to look on them was to ache.

I also saw–and held my breath as we passed–feedlots, and the image of the cattle straining their heads past the troughs that held their day’s rations to nip at the few blades of grass growing outside the fenceline is one that’s branded on my mind’s eye. I’ll not soon forget it.

So I returned home to Virginia with two week’s worth of iPhone pictures of mountains and national monuments and with the taste of New Mexico green chili sauce and Texas barbeque lingering on my tongue.

My emotions were mixed. I felt gratitude to have spent time among people I’d known for many years and loved as long as I’ve known them. But I also felt crushed with the weight of all the wrongness I’d been witness to. Soil treated like trash: as inert matter not a living thing, used as a vehicle to introduce fertilizer and pesticides to plants… Amid all those vast acres … was there even one earthworm to be found?

I just wanted to make like any good Southern woman of privilege faced with the unfathomable … and take to my bed …

So what has given me hope? Or quelled my roiling fear to the extent that, after this long silence, I’m again moved to write?

There’s no one answer to that question.

I think it began with my students. The semester began at the end of August, like it always does. And I noted, as I always do, that there’s a question in the faces they bring to me. And that questioning recalls to me what it felt like to be so young–so passionately alive–and so without a clue.

It hurts me that they know the world holds out less hope for them than it did for my generation–and the generation before mine. They seem to need something, something like–oh, I don’t know–like perhaps a signal fire to light their way through this blighted, fallen world?

Since I need basically the same thing, I can’t be that for them. But I can show them where to look, how to rake the coals. I can help them, maybe, to kindle a light of their own.

So that’s how it began. And this is how it continues. This is the thing that gives me the courage to take one more step into tomorrow. It’s a memory from my summer vacation: a memory of the “White House” ruin at Canyon de Chelly.

From the south rim overlook, the ruin looks like no more than a thumbnail-sized niche in the opposing canyon wall. But people have lived there since the 12th century before Christ. Navajo families still live there and grow peaches and corn–as they did millennia ago–and tell stories and make paintings about how the world began in the long-ago time …

This is my memory of the place: We stood at the scenic overlook, trying to make sense of that vast expanse of rock. Norma would come only so close–she’s afraid of heights and snakes, which makes so much of our journey, through very high places infested with rattlesnakes, a minor miracle. And an artist came to talk to us.

He was an odd little man. Dark-skinned and dark-eyed, furtive yet jaunty in the way of all beings both shy of and sure of other humans.

He pointed out the “White House”–we would have surely missed it had he not been there. He told us his name … then five minutes later said another name altogether … and stitched it all together with a story about a turtle and the beginning of the world.

Norma bought the painting he’d made of the turtle–as much for the story, she told him, as for the artwork.

And then a violent wind blew up–so strong the grit stirred from the canyon wall pricked us as with the stings of many small bees. And we were driven back to the safety of the car … to continue our journey east and south …

What does it mean? I had no idea then and have little notion now. But somehow, suddenly, looking back at me, furtive yet jaunty, is the thing called hope. And it doesn’t have wings and feathers like in the poem, but lives in an ancient riverbed in sight of a White House and a place where peach trees have grown for 32 centuries.

And it’s making me think, hope–no–pray … that perhaps we may endure.

All these reminders of the city I’ve long thought of as my spiritual home have me seriously humming that old tune, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” (Check out Billie and Louis singing my song …)

Pause to ponder the French Quarter… think I was on Decatur, down toward the Esplanade end… Sigh…

So what does a goddess–of gumbo, no less–do when she’s missing home? Why, she gets crackin’ in the kitchen, that’s what! And what did I decide on for a special New Orleans treat for Baby and me? Something that says Crescent City as few other dishes do: crawfish etouffee.

Why etouffee instead of gumbo? you may be asking. Well, I think of gumbo as a production–something involving giant batches and lots of friends. As for etouffee–well, it’s is one of the things I learned to do with the leftovers after the crawfish boil: a private pleasure to share a deux with one’s sweetie, with jazz in the background, a refreshing pink cava in hand.

You’re sold. I can tell.

Unfortunately, etouffee is not one of those dishes I know like the back of my hand the way I do gumbo. I need a recipe to produce something that would do justice to the down-home Louisiana cooks who introduced me to the dish nearly two decades ago.

A warning is justified here. Anyone who has the slightest interest in Louisiana cuisine knows there are all kinds of recipes for etouffee floating around the Internet–most of them with the lead ingredient “2 tablespoons of (insert restaurant name) seasoning mix.” (Would you believe etouffee with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup? Humph, that’s something I wouldn’t feed my cats.)

I hope I don’t have to tell you to flee all recipes wrapped around a marketing opportunity like the wind. Etouffee correctly prepared is fragrant and flavorful and fabulous on its own, and people enjoyed it for centuries before salty branded seasoning mixes began to proliferate on grocery store shelves.

Great recipes, easy to adapt–thanks forever down-home chef Nancy Dixon for introducing me to this gem.

As for the recipe I use–the one that results in an etouffee that is most like the scrumptious dish my beloved pal Ernie Seals prepared for me and a group of salivating poets in 1992–it’s adapted from The Plantation Cookbook by the Junior League of New Orleans. This is an absolutely fabulous cookbook, one that manages to convey most clearly–along with certain of the recipes in Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking, another fave–the sheer sophistication of creole cooking as distinct from the rich peasant goodness of Cajun cuisine.

(Be warned that it’s an old cookbook–the version I have was first published in 1972–so  convenience items like ketchup and saltine crackers will occasionally make their way into lists of ingredients. And they do spend an awful lot of time talking about … well, plantations. But its virtues far outweigh its flaws.)

You’ll find the recipe for crawfish etouffee on p. 151, headed by a most intimidating list of ingredients. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that it’s not so much the number of ingredients that matters with etouffee, it’s the way they’re clustered and the timing for adding them.

The word etouffee means “smothered”–so first, and most important, is the roux. To prepare the roux, you’ll need to have two clusters of ingredients prepped. First the butter and flour for the roux proper–then the chopped vegetables that you’ll be adding to the roux and that will form the basis of the smothering sauce.

Please note that the order is absolutely critical. You have to get the roux the right color before adding any liquid or vegetables–because these additions stop the browning process. This is a distinction that seems lost in most internet recipes–which are all about dumbing down the process for folks who want to prepare a dish in 45 minutes. Nothing wrong with that desire. But one can make any number of delicious things in 45 minutes: Etouffee should not be one of them. (This is, in case you missed my bias, a second reason not to trust the internet on etouffee.)

The recipe I’m using serves around six or eight people and includes two pounds of crawfish and fairly massive amounts butter and flour. For two people, I cut the amount of butter and flour in the roux to 6 and 2 tablespoons, respectively. After melting the butter and adding the flour, I  cook them together, stirring rapidly, until the roux is somewhere between walnut and pecan in color (speaking of the nut meats, not the shells, that is).

This is the roux after adding the vegetables and simmering 30 minutes. It’s a bit too dark, but too dark is better, flavor-wise, than too light.

As soon as the roux looks right, I add two more tablespoons of butter and the diced vegetables I’ve prepped: a yellow onion, 5 or 6 green onions (including the stalks), a green pepper and a few ribs of celery, plus two minced garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and fresh minced basil and thyme from my garden.

This mixture cooks for 30 minutes. That’s right, 30 whole minutes. And it’ll will be thick even with the addition of the extra butter, so you’ll have to keep stirring it to keep it from sticking to your cast iron skillet.

After the half hour is up, you’ll add the elements that will complete the smothering process: the fire and the water. And here’s where you can stray a bit from the recipe according to individual taste.

The fire comes in the form of wet and dry seasonings: white and black pepper, salt, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce. And the water is composed of two wet ingredients: 8 oz of tomato sauce and 2 cups of “liquid.” Since the writers know this is vague, the recipe explains in a note the various things one may use. A hint: Plain water is not even mentioned as an option.

If you’re fortunate enough to have fresh crawfish, the absolute best liquid is either the juice used to cook the crawfish or a stock made from the crawfish heads. Both of these will have generous amounts of bright orange crawfish fat, the stuff that makes crawfish etouffee so uniquely yummy.

My favorite brand is from Breaux Bridge–which I used to drive through a couple of times a month when I lived in Louisiana. Buying it somehow soothes the homesick…

Here in Virginia, though, fresh crawfish tends to be either unavailable or prohibitively expensive, so there has to be a substitution. Shrimp stock, made from the heads and shells, is pretty much a staple in my freezer. But if it’s not in yours, clam juice makes a decent substitute.

OK, back to my crawfish etouffee–which, here, starts to detour from the The Plantation Cookbook. The recipe calls for 8 whole ounces of tomatoes plus Tabasco sauce. Well, I don’t like tomatoes in my etouffee and I don’t like Tabasco on anything but oysters. At the same time, I’m very fond of the tang that Worcestershire sauce provides.

So my sauce cuts the tomatoes to  1/4 cup rather than the 1/2 cup indicated by a strict adherence to the proportions. It also substitutes Crystal hot sauce for the Tabasco and adds a tablespoon of Worcestershire–the full amount called for in the original recipe.

As for my “liquid,” I use a cup of shrimp stock and a cup of dry white vermouth (my favorite cooking wine for seafood)–this, too, is the full amount called for in the recipe.

So after I assemble my “fire and water” ingredients according to my taste–and remember, I have plenty of time to do this while the roux and vegetables are bubbling away–I add everything to the roux, bring all ingredients to back a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer.

I’ll bet you think you’re about done now. You would be wrong. This mixture cooks for one hour. You heard me: One. Full. Hour. So if you’ve found a recipe that tells you the sauce will be ready in 10 minutes, don’t believe it. You can’t get down-home flavor using short cuts. (That should actually be engraved somewhere–on the monument to down-home cooks, perhaps?)

You’ll have check and stir the sauce frequently, adding more liquid or even water at this stage if needed to keep it from sticking. And in the very last step, you’ll add the crawfish.

If the crawfish is freshly cooked, turn off the heat and taste the mixture, adjusting the seasonings. You can also add a couple of optional ingredients to give extra added zing: a tablespoon of lemon juice, some lemon zest, some freshly minced parsley, a tablespoon of brandy or cognac.

And if you’re using frozen crawfish, don’t even bother to thaw. Allow the sauce to continue to simmer, then set the block of frozen product on top of the mixture and slowly stir it in before finishing off with the lemon, parsley, and brandy.

Add the crawfish … and 1 tablespoon of lemon with the zest…

This is what it looks like after about a minute of stirring…

The recipe calls for cognac at the end, but brandy works just fine–at half the price.

Now all etouffees and gumbos are at their best if the flavors given time to “rest” before serving so that the flavors have the opportunity to marry. So your etouffee should be allowed to rest with the heat off for at least an hour before serving. And ff you’re the foresighted type of cook who’s able to make a dish in the morning and serve in the evening, remember that you want to reheat the dish slowly without bringing to a boil, as crawfish shrink and grow tough if cooked too long at too high a heat.

So this is what I served on “I Miss New Orleans/Memorial Day.”

WWOZ, the last great radio station left in the United States (listen here), was playing in the background. And yes, we drank pink cava.

It was a Memorial Day to savor–and remember.

I had such a good fancy plate shot… But Baby started eating while I was shooting. Yeah, it was that good.

Pretty flowers, huh? Who knew they were edible? Our Burmese gardeners, that’s who.

I’m not a complete idiot. I do understand that, from their point of view, the point of view of African Americans who were the first in their respective families to achieve a higher education, my obsession with grubbing in the dirt may seem a tad … eccentric… At best.

I’ve tried taking the tack that it’s an heirs property thing. I am, after all, the eldest grandchild of a group of grandchildren who’ll be inheriting nearly 150 acres of beautiful, productive land in the South Carolina foothills. I should know what the land requires and how to steward it.

They’re not quite buying it.

I try the economic argument. Hey, I say, I live in Charlottesville, Virginia: a city that Forbes magazine recently dubbed “the locavore capital of the United States.” Experience here seems to indicate that farmland is increasingly valuable. Hedge fund managers are even speculating in it. People are moving here from all over the country to start organic farms–and they’re finding it personally rewarding and profitable. Given those trends, we are well ahead of the game in our family, I say. We own our own land. We should be exploring ways to make it pay.

They look at me as if I’ve gone mental. In their frame of reference, there’s no way to make farmland pay–nor any reason to try. Don’t you know that’s work, is the unvoiced plaint.

Finally, I try the spiritual angle. They’re good Episcopalians, after all. Daddy is a delegate to the general convention. Shoot, he chairs a community housing agency funded by the diocese that’s been providing affordable housing for young families in downtown Charleston for nearly 20 years now.

Hey, we want to empower people to grow their own food, I tell my mom, rattling off the local statistics on adult diabetes and childhood obesity. And then there are the Burmese refugees, I add. These people had to leave everything to come to America. We’re hoping maybe a garden with things they like to eat will make them feel more at home.

This gets a reaction–but not the one I wanted. “Kendra, are you sure you know what you’re doing? You’d better be careful,” my mom says, instantly alarmed.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is, after all, her reaction whether I’m proposing to cross the street or cross the country (which I did, to the accompaniment of much hand-wringing, in 2001). “Come on, mama,” I cajole her. “Jesus said, feed my sheep.”

She gives a snort of exasperation. “Why do you have to take everything so literally!” I can almost hear her thinking.

I just shake my head. Maybe I should have just said, Hey, they’re great cooks. She’s always interested in new recipes.

That’s not to give the impression that integrating the new families into our work has not been a challenge. It has and not just because of the language barrier. Our tools are unfamiliar. Our heavy clay soils, depleted by centuries of abuse by extractive tobacco and cotton planting regimes, are unfamiliar and do not yield up their riches without techniques–the rigorous application of double digging and soil amendments, to name just two–that may also be unfamiliar.

And our foods are unfamiliar.

Ali Cole, helping with the root harvest.

I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon about a month-and-a-half ago with Pleh Meh, a self-possessed 20-something who’s serving as translator for the three families who have joined us, and Win Htay Oo–young also, stylishly dressed, the epitome of urban cool. Married to the city’s ESL coordinator, Win had stopped by to lend his English skills to the task at hand: poring over seed catalogs and kitchen garden picture books to ascertain what seeds the Burmese families wanted to grow.

Win drew me a map to show me where his and Pleh Meh’s respective homes were, then indicated all the respective borders and border states with lines and stars: Thailand, Laos, China, India, Bangladesh. I nodded as a big hunk of world geography suddenly fell into place in the map of the world inside my head.

Then we dug into the catalogs, and I discovered … that there’s actually very little dietary overlap between the Southeast U.S. and Southeast Asia. Win and Pleh Meh waxed enthusiastic over okra, tomatoes (sauce style), eggplant (green! not purple), Thai basil and peppers. Peanuts were cool, too–though there were many, many  greens and gourds that are staples for them … and unknown here.

Meanwhile, the fruit we call tomatillo was quite familiar. “That grows all over the rainforest,” Win said. “Nobody touch,” he added with perfect comic timing. We all laughed.

Again and again as we leafed through the pages of The New Kitchen Garden, Win would shake his head at the gorgeous pictures of potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, most of the peppers we enjoy, not to mention the grains we like and the most common spinaches, broccolis, cabbages, and beans. “They don’t know what to do with that,” his refrain.

That answered my question about too much duplication of effort between the family beds and the communal beds for the rest of the gardeners. But it also gave me food for fretting about how we’d manage our collaboration.

I might as well have saved the energy. On the ground, our neighbors turned out to be quite curious about the things that we grow–the turnips, for example. (Though I don’t think they were quite curious enough to try them.)

Ika, at right, was curious about the turnip… but planning on eating the greens!

And unexpectedly, they’ve taught us new uses for the parts of the plants that we would have otherwise tossed on the compost heap. For example, the bolts off of the mustard, turnip, and collard greens that overwintered in our garden.

By “bolts,” I should explain, I mean the flowering stalks that cool-season plants grown primarily for their leafy green parts start producing once the days get longer and the soils get warmer. Basically, the arrival of that gay profusion of pretty yellow flowers is the first stage in the plant’s going to seed–something I’ve always been taught is an undesirable thing.

A row of bolting greens makes quite a pretty show.

You see, the taste of vegetables changes when plants start moving toward the end of their life cycle. Spinach, which during the deepest cold achieves a sweetness almost indescribable, develops a sharp taste that, while not unpleasant, simply does not compare with the taste of the leaves at their prime. The appealing bite of mustard greens, on the other hand, becomes more and more peppery, nearly bitter. Lettuces become decidedly bitter.

All of us garden volunteers loved the look of the bolting greens–and it was with something quite near sadness that we started ripping the rows out over several days about a month ago in order to prepare the beds for our warm and hot season plants: potatoes, beans and peas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes…

The absolute center of cute in our garden on harvest day.

We were sad, particularly, because we’d had such plans for the 100 linear feet of spinach we’d grown. We’d talked of making spinach quiches and spinach lasagnas for church suppers–of all sorts of things–but at the end, the need for speed meant that we’d just be ripping them out and distributing them among the volunteers and neighbors. (Not a bad thing, of course, just not as splashy as we’d hoped).

Then I glanced over to the other side of the garden and saw Pleh Meh’s mother, Ika, doing something I had never imagined. She and a young woman whose name I hadn’t understood, a diminutive thing with a darling baby girl and a “bun in the oven,” were carefully harvesting the collard and turnip greens, taking only the tenderest of the tiny top leaves-and the entire flower stalk.

“Wow, you can eat those?” said Peggy, an experienced and avid gardener who’d been working the spinach row with me.

“I guess so,” I replied, feeling slightly stunned. “Well, yeah! Sure. They’re edible,” I added as I processed the new information. “Of course, you can eat them. I just … never imagined doing it.”

But later that night, baby and I tried it.

Greens and flower stalks, ready to pop in the skillet

Since I couldn’t ask Ika for her recipe, I treated them the way I treat kale or mustards. I made a hot olive oil dressing in my cast iron skillet, adding plenty of garlic and balsamic vinegar, a dash of Bragg’s Amino Acids, and a few red pepper flakes. Then I tossed the greens in that mixture, rapidly, over medium heat, until they were tender.

It took eight minutes–ten at the most. They were absolutely delicious.

So that’s my first cooking tip from Burma.  I’m looking forward to many more to come.

Heck, no.

You see, yesterday I watched a movie, a movie I’ve long anticipated, the first new(ish) release I’ve seen in  months, one that’s been showered with praise and film awards. The Black Swan.

Natalie Portman in a rather boringly traditional black tutu.

That’s right. The one that got Natalie Portman lots of pretty gold  statues from the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards, and about a dozen others. The one that got Daniel Aronofsky a boatload more best director nominations and the kind of press reviews that people in his industry hire hit men to deal with. The one that you probably saw months ago, but that the preadolescent ballet junkie that still lives deep within my soul had spent literally months avoiding–all hype, all trailers, all reviews–because I wanted to come to the movie completely fresh. No preconceptions, no outside opinions tainting my perceptions.

And honestly, I might as well not have bothered because I didn’t just dislike it. I HATED it. I didn’t just hate it, I was outraged by it. I wasn’t just outraged by it, I bent my poor baby’s ears about what a misogynist piece of crap I thought it was–well, I’m sure to him it seemed like hours.

So now, poor dears, it’s your turn to be subjected to my Black Swan rant. Strap in. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Two things you should know up front. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by summarizing the plot. Presumably I’m the last person in America who has seen this movie, so I think I can dispense with telling you what happened. (Though if you want a quick refresher, you can look at the music video version of the trailer here.)

Also, I’m also not going to quibble with Natalie Portman’s performance. There are no adjectives adequate to describe how completely she inhabited the role of Nina and no superlatives strong enough to praise her–something I never expected to be able to say of the girl who gave such a convincing performance as a stick figure in the Star Wars trilogy.

What I object to is the runaway misogyny of director Aronofsky’s vision. I have never in a long life of moviegoing seen a more virulently hateful collection of hags, wenches, and assorted nutjobs. And I’m baffled that none of the reviews or discussions in any of my various social networks took the slightest note of the fact.

As exhibit A, we have the corps de ballet–beautiful, willowy thin, graceful as so many reeds bending in the breeze, but potty-mouthed, back-biting, two-faced cretins one and all.

Then, as exhibit B, Barbara Hershey as Nina’s mother, Erica, a former dancer  who’s creepily obsessed with keeping her daughter as sexually pure as a music-box ballerina–even if that means preventing her from dancing the role of a lifetime: the Swan Queen in Swan Lake.

Exhibit C is an almost unrecognizable Winona Ryder playing Beth Macintyre, whose star is fading even as Nina’s is rising. Deciding even though she can only be 30 that life is over, she walks in front of a car, landing herself in the hospital with a shattered leg. She tops that performance later in the film, when she stabs herself repeatedly in the face with a nail file while screaming that she is “Nothing! Nothing!”

The most damning evidence for the prosecution would have to be Mila Kunis in the role of Nina’s seductive, manipulative, immensely appealing but ultimately two-faced understudy, Lila. Was there hot lesbian sex  between the two, or was it one of Nina’s hallucinations? I have no idea. And it doesn’t matter because no encounter would have taken place had Lily not roophied Nina’s drink. That’s right. She drugged her rival in order to take her place onstage. I mean you can’t go much lower.

Finally, there’s Nina herself. She’s bulimic, she’s crazy, but she’s also, at heart, a gifted girl warped by her mother and by the values of a world that insists on nearly impossible standards of beauty wedded to athleticism masked by artistry. Nina is an immensely sympathetic character, because her journey is every girl’s journey–she’s seeking to claim her power, both her sexual power and the star power that’s been inhibited by the unnatural life she’s led. She’s seeking to claim herself, to create an independent life, to embrace and embody her life’s work. And I think I could have forgiven Aronofsky for everything that had gone before–if he’d only let her. Then, there would have been some movement toward affirmation, toward transcendence. Instead, Lily gives the performance of a lifetime–and dies.

And I’m still enraged–and outraged.

This appears to be the essence of Aronofsky’s vision:

1. Menopausal women are emotional vampires fattening off the beauty, innocence, and talent of the young.
2. Women are washed up at 30 and might as well kill themselves or die.
3. Before they are washed up, when they’re young and beautiful, if they are also sexual, then they are viciously competitive, two-faced, and willing to sink to any depth, commit any betrayal to get what they want.
4. But if they’re young, beautiful, and sexually unaware, they will die the moment they claim their sexuality.
5. Also, they’ll die when they achieve their professional goals because to pursue personal and professional excellence, not to mention life balance or health in any form, is to court death.

Basically, women suck and then they die. Though it’s better if they die younger, because they turn into really scary hags when they get old. Honestly, if you let your daughter see this movie except as an object lesson of what antifeminism looks like, you should stand accused of child abuse.

Rudolph Nureyev, when young and gorgeous.

Let me backtrack a few steps and note that I am passionate about ballet. I was only three years old when Rudolph Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union, but I could have told you who he was by the time I was in second grade just like I could have told you who Martin Luther King was.

That’s because in the sixties and seventies, even in the South, ballet stars were more like rock stars.

We had a better-than-average ballet school in Charleston, my hometown, one that produced professional-level dancers, including a high school classmate of mine who bailed on college for a few years to dance professionally in New York. So my childhood memories of wider world events tend to veer wildly from  images of dogs and fire hoses turned on demonstrators to assassinations and napalm  flames in the Southeast Asian rain forest to defections.

Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of the great “swans.”

The gorgeous Arthur Mitchell, Balanchine alum and founder of Dance Theater of Harlem.

You know, defections. Mikhail Baryshnikov  escaping to the West. Gelsey Kirkland abandoning the New York City Ballet to dance with Misha.

The magical, ethereal Gelsey Kirkland.

The incomparable Mikhail Baryshnikov.

It shouldn’t surprise you then that I tend to be rather obsessive about dance movies, if fairly indiscriminate. Basically, I love them all. From The Red Shoes to Turning Point. From White Nights to Strictly Ballroom. I adored Rent, though not Moulin Rouge (go figure). I don’t even mind the cheesy, awful ones, like Flashdance and Footloose. Though I did draw the line at Jessica Alba’s Honey (treacle-y sweet).

Grace and power–Alvin Ailey’s Judith Jamison

So, you may be asking, why so much vitriol for this film? You mean, besides the fact that it celebrates predatory male sexual behavior and  trades in cheap, exploitative sexual thrills while resurrecting every vile, hateful stereotype about the nature and sexuality of women (dude, they actually used the word “frigid”–repeatedly) since St. Paul? Yes, there is something else. Two things, actually.

First, it disappoints at the level of dance. We keep being told that the director’s version of Swan Lake will be like nothing ever seen before. But the costumes, frankly, look like every other version of Swan Lake I’ve ever seen–tons of tulle and a few black feathers. Yawn. Not to mention the fact that there’s not a whole lot of dancing. From Portman particularly we get lots of allegro footwork, some closeups of  fouette turns, a whole lot of yearning around corners and from the wings. In point of fact, we spend so much more time looking at Portman’s face than her feet that the final performance that so enraptures everyone in the film falls flat–at least for this dance fan.

Second–and more damning to my mind because it speaks to something that’s wrong with American filmmaking in general, something that’s been keeping this particular butt out of theater seats for quite som time now–the film disappoints at the level of storytelling.

I’m happy to explain.

I believe that, for some years now, American filmmakers seem to have embrached the notion that to be “dark” is thereby to be interesting. But if not wedded to a moral vision–yeah, I used the M-word–then being dark can be just as cheap and exploitative as the obligatory happy ending of the formula drama or comedy.

The problem with The Black Swan is, that despite the gorgeous production values, it’s essentially squalid. And it’s small. Nina’s death has a reductive effect on the proceedings, shrinking the sexual exploration, for example, from a fumbling, bumbling search to connect with the world of feeling to soft-core porn. The death, in effect, closes the film off like a box, creating a claustrophobic structure in which all avenues for escape, for transcendence, goshdarnit, for meaning, are foreshortened and blighted.

Now, imagine if Nina had lived to take her bow. Then that struggle literally over broken glass to find her sexuality and to find herself would have been redeemed. Allowing her to survive wouldn’t have changed the fact that she was mental–and so was everyone in her world. It need not have changed any of the action–because so little of it makes rational sense in any accepted definition of the word anyway. But it would have changed something crucial: the audience’s perceptions of the possibilities for human existence.

And incidentally, I think the film also would have won Best Picture.

I’m done with grading. I’ll be blogging again soon.

Time–no longer just slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future

Last year I was totin’ that barge and liftin’ that bale in a job that could only be described as the most ghastly of intellectual sweatshops. This year… Well, there’s only one way to describe it, and if it’s corny, so be it.

I’m living my authentic life. Not my so-called life. My authentic life.

Now, let’s be clear. Some really important intangibles have lined up on the plus side: I’ve got the A(ll)B(ut)D(issertation) monkey off my back, for one, and, just as importantly, the Evil Empire, also known as SNL Financial, is so far in my taillights as to be almost invisible.

I’m “walkin” May 22. Not, sigh, in these fancy doctoral robes, but I could! If I had $1,000…

But there are minuses on the material end of things. Big ones.

You’ve seen me luxuriating in this blog in my relative leisure (compared with last year) to write and teach (even master’s students! woo-hoo!) and garden. But the reality is: I’m not yet on tenure track, and my income has not recovered to pre-financial downturn days.

No reason to front: I’m making just shy of half what I made in my last really flush year. That’s right: half.

Now, think about that—what would your life look like if your income were cut in half? Mine, I can assure you, has not been pretty. If it weren’t for my housemate, soon to become my employer, not even the mortgage would be a sure thing. You see now why I call this period my Great Depression.

And yet … the financial uncertainty does not change the fact that I’m suddenly, mysteriously, most blessedly (given last year’s mind-numbing state of depression)  … happy.

Yesterday, I stepped off the university loop bus at 8:55 a.m. sharp. It was the first day of the year that has felt and looked more like early summer than spring. The bursts of color that were the ornamentals in the landscape are transitioning from whites and pinks to a patchwork of pale and emerald greens. The oaks that form an allee on either side of the street from the library to the end of the “ranges” have fully leafed out and unfurled into a restless curtain overhead. The relatively muggy morning held a promise of heat later in the day, but there was a breeze tossing the leaves and my hair into confusion. And, for no reason at all, my spirits were just soaring.

Another beautiful day at UVA–the Chinese redbud behind my building…

I was reminded of the last time in my life I recall feeling pure, unalleviated, unadulterated happiness. This was nearly twently years ago on the Louisiana State University campus on a similar day that, in that warm climate, occurred a full two months earlier. It was a February day before Mardi Gras. The sweet olives were blooming and layering their rich perfume on the warm air. Everyone was wearing shorts, and I felt a sense of being in the right place at the right time doing the thing I was born to do that was so blissful, so keen that I knew it wouldn’t last. Knew it instinctively, the way I know how to season shrimp and grits, the way I know Southern men love to see a Southern woman in a big picture frame hat.

So I also knew what I needed to do: I stored up that memory for colder, less beneficent times. And they came. Lord, lord, lord, did they ever come.

The emotion I felt today was in no wise as intense as what I felt walking among the sweet olives in Baton Rouge all those years ago. But I recognized it as the same in kind if not the same in degree. And I felt as if I’d stumbled unwittingly upon some universal law. If I had to articulate it, maybe I’d call it the law of … living in the present?

When you get right down to it, I’ve spent years, maybe decades even trapped in the past—blaming, regretting, torturing myself for things done, left undone, done to me… Not to mention all the time I’ve wasted living in the future: dreaming of what I could do when I possessed X, how life would change when I had achieved Y, the look on so-and-so’s face when they had to acknowledge Z… It’s kind of like living life in a speeding car: The past is pretty clear in the rear-view mirror, the future hasn’t yet come into view but it’s clear in one’s mind, while the present … is a giant blur.

Maybe my present never could come into focus because I could never be satisfied with it, kept looking for that next thing, right over the horizon, that would make it all  … well, my authentic life. So I’d stay someplace a while and move on. Learn to love a group of people yet follow the siren call to the next horizon. And when something really special did happen—first book publication, say—and the world’s headlong rush did not pause to crown me the next literary star, not only did I endure that disappointment, but also I didn’t allow myself to pause to celebrate or to thank the people who stuck with me along the way. Not for anything. It was almost like I felt ashamed of my beautiful little child because the world didn’t stop at the stroller to coo… Just crazy—crazytalk! I think now.

Could it be that what was missing all those years was just gratitude? Simple gratitude?

Looking back, it seems as if good things piled on top of good things in my life, which I was unable to appreciate and didn’t even try to enjoy. So one by one, each treasured plank in my personal security was simply taken away until, by the time of the Lehman Brothers crash in 2008, I found myself balanced on one thin board over an abyss during an earthquake, watching what looked to be the whole world falling down around me. And for a while I gave up hope.

Specifically, I gave up my dream of living a life of purpose and meaning through writing. It was at a dead end anyway, because I’d spent every dime I could raise or borrow to get the dissertation to the finish line and was rather desperately in need of cash. I thought my only choice was to take the first of what would be a series of dead-end, soul-sucking jobs for which all my previous experiences with white-collar intellectual work had left me unprepared and for which I was fundamentally temperamentally unsuited.

I chose security and learned the final lesson that I was apparently intended to learn: that there is no situation so bad that one’s attitude can’t make it worse. Reallly, the less said about that period the better. I’m just glad I lived through it. And I’m certain of something, too: I’m quite positive I wouldn’t have lived through it if I hadn’t learned to live in the now.

There was a bit of a trick—well, actually quite a trick—to it. I had simply to let go of the past, leave the future to its come in its own time, and direct my full, undivided, loving attention to the things and people in front of one.

Now anyone who’s tried to let go of something difficult will understand that what I’m talking about is no mean feat—and there’s no hope of achieving it at all without some strategies for keeping the nasty thoughts, the doubts, the discontent, and the disapproval resolutely and absolutely at bay. My goal—and I’ll admit I’m not yet there—is never to allow myself the luxury of a negative thought.

But there has been one concrete, positive result, and that is that  my dreams are no longer like that mirage in the desert that drives the lost traveler around the bend—the things that torture me. Instead, they’re sources of hope and renewal—a flame that did not die during the hard times by some miracle for which I thank God and all the angels.

My little meditation circle at Sugar Hollow…

Maybe that’s the secret. I no longer worry about the future, so there’s no need to waste time and energy blocking out the images of the unpleasant thing that in my soul I’m convinced is right around the corner. Instead, I treat my dreams like daydreams, as an intention for the future that lightly, ehhh-ver so lightly, guides my attention in the present … my compass needle’s true north, regardless of what direction I may be facing.

I know, I know. All this sounds way too mystical and kind of crazy, and I’ll bet you’re wishing I’d go back to blogging about gardening. But it’s been raining a lot lately, so I’ve had time to look around a bit and measure the distance I’ve traveled over the past year. And baby, I’ve come a long way.

Just twelve months ago, I hated my life. Every moment that I spent within the walls of the building I thought of as the Death Star (as the one of the enslaved minions of the Evil Emperor—yes, I do have a turn for the dramatic) was a misery. I longed desperately for escape, yet feared leaving the ranks of the “full-time-with-benefits” crowd. I felt trapped. I wished, not all the time idly, that I were dead. That was then.

Today, the skies are going to be partly sunny, I don’t have to be on campus, and I have only two things on my mind: washing my kitchen down with that nice mint bath that keeps the ants at bay and getting back out in the garden to harvest that giant row of spinach.

If that gets done before noon—and it should—then I’ll have the whole of the afternoon to work on the revisions for my second book and get a nice dinner on the table for me and Baby to share when he returns from his labors in other people’s gardens. It sounds very mundane, rather dull, in fact—and yet I got up at five a.m. because I was so eager to get started.

So, sufficient unto the day is every day’s potential for bliss—that’s what I say every day these days. And it feels suspiciously like … my new authentic life.

Coreopsis verticillata “Zagreb”–one of my summer faves.

It’s a job that I might not have taken were it not for my new-found serenity. Normally, the very thought of summer joblessness–of any joblessness–would have thrown me into such heart palpitations and panicked hand-wringing that I would have applied for just about anything …

Indeed, I was on the verge of applying for a summer job at the community college wrangling college-bound high school students–something with a high rate of pay but for which I am vastly overqualified …

But instead of plunging into the application, I simply paused for a moment to think … And No, came the answer from that deep silence within, I would prefer not.

See, I believe I’ve learned a few lessons from the vicissitudes I’ve endured during this period I’ve started calling “the Great Depression 2.0″ (inspired by the fact that during the 1.0 version, no one ever admitted that it was anything but a recession). I have, in fact, gotten downright “lilies of the field” (“they spin not, neither do they sow …”) about stuff that used to send me flat around the bend.

So the job offer I decided to accept? I’m going to work for the McVicker.

I think it makes sense. He needs someone to handle the administrative end while he’s out in the field on a backhoe, dreaming over his sketches, or out in the nursery communing with his viburnums. I’m great at talking, massaging egos, and organizing the activities of all persons other than myself… Plus, it means I get to put my priorities first: talk plants all day, work on my community gardening initiatives, and even … gasp! Write!

So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s that I’m learning some things I didn’t know, or that maybe I hadn’t thought of, and that I certainly don’t like, about the American Way of Gardening.

You see, most of the McVicker’s clients are a dream–they feed you lunch or glasses of wine, they’re endlessly curious about the natural world and want to talk plants well past the time you’ve allotted to respond, they’re patient or quirky or kind or crack-me-up funny–each one awesome in his or her completely individual way.

And then there are the … well, frightening people who remind me first line of Anna Karenina, only in reverse. Tolstoy, quite the gardener himself, now that I think of it, said something that’s always stayed with me: “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is  unhappy in its own particular way.”

Well, maybe that goes for families, but with unhappy gardeners, I’m here to tell you, the complaints are all alike. There are the can’t you do it faster people, the can you do it bigger people, and the can you cut the fee people, all closely related to the humph! we can do better than that ordering online crowd. I swear when you get a couple of those folks on the phone in a row, it’s like they’re reading from a script.

Is your grower ethical? Have you ever even wondered?

The ordering online complaint really gets me. Sure you can, I think to myself. But do you know anything about that cheap plant? Is it from a grower  that pumps the stock up on hourly infusions of water and fertilizer so that they’re catalog perfect when they arrive and DOA the instant they run up against a heavy clay soil or a Virginia heat wave or freeze?

Sometimes, I even say that. Folks need to understand that, when it comes to plants adapted to one’s particular soils and microclimate, local really does matter.

But the other  complaints raise issues that are much more complex. Issues that, at this early stage of the game, I have not figured out the most productive way to address.

I think I have put my finger on at least part of the why: the proliferation of garden shows on HGTV and even my beloved public television. With their blizzards of buzzwords and one-stop solutions profferred by genial hosts, these shows turn gardening into a sort of time-lapse spectator sport in which no problem is too complex to solve before the homeowner gets home from work or the 60-minute time slot has expired.

When was the last time you started seeds?

What’s created in viewers is an orientation to the natural world that is essentially consumerist. Got a problem? Buy a solution.

Since only professionals or the most passionate of amateurs propagate or grow from seed any more, large swaths of the population have lost the sense that growing things is both a relationship and a process.

The McVicker is always saying that horticulture, once woven into the fabric of everyday life, is no longer a part of American culture, and it needs to be again because it’s the solution to many, many, many of our ills. But the other piece of the puzzle that’s been lost is the fact that horticulture, while a word for a science, is also a word for  art, and art takes time.

The unhappy gardeners are simply more extreme versions of us. We don’t have time for relationships; we don’t have time for art. We want it now.

I was sitting with Kevin a few days ago–one of our best friends from church. I was explaining what I was thinking and feeling, sort of fumbling around on it. And Kevin–who’s not just smart, he’s downright wise–put his finger right on the wrongness I could feel in my bones but couldn’t quite get to.

“I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m a small businessman, too, and you see that attitude all over. See, people don’t realize you can get that instant scale–or if they want it really fast and really cheap, you can get that, too. But to get it, you’ve got to take it out of somebody’s back.”

When he said that, it was like getting beaned between the eyebrows with a lead bar. “Kevin–that’s it–you’re so right!”

Kevin has a deep rumbling voice with a beautiful broad Kentucky accent, and when he laughs it sounds like a bass saxophone rumbling out into mountain hollers. He laughed then at my expression, but then his face turned somber because, even though he has a nice business and a nice family and a beautiful home, he grew up poor in Kentucky and he knows exactly what time it is.

“Yeah, usually it’s some poor uneducated slob–here, mostly poor blacks and poor whites. Now that they’re not quite so desperate, we got the immigrants and refugees to exploit. It’s sick.” He paused and took a long meditative swig from his red wine. “Folks don’t think about it, but everything costs.”

So that’s what it all boils down to. Everything costs. And if you’re not willing to acknowledge your complicity and your ethical responsibility, you’re basically committing class warfare in the coreopsis.

The irony is that I’ve been teaching this stuff all semester in my class on “the Big House,” the myth and the reality of the plantation. Week after week, I’ve been marching my students through these novels and films and contrasting the idealized vision with the collateral damage in terms of blighted lives, poisoned relationships, and depleted soils that accompanies the plantation economic model.

I’ve been saying, This stuff has a legacy, particularly in the food we eat and the way we grow it…

A must-read…

But I have not made the obvious connection to the plants and flowers we choose to grow, where and how we source them. It’s been lingering there in the back of my mind, but it’s kind of stayed there.

That’s perhaps because the McVicker grows his own and sources what he doesn’t from suppliers he knows well either through the City Market or through relationships forged over decades.

Now, he used to work for one of the big boys–was production manager for a area nursery with 17 farm sites running 5 tractor trailers per day all over the mid-Atlantic region. He turned his back on that life well over a decade ago and, except for the occasional funny story, never mentions it except to say every now and again that he just doesn’t care for that way of growing plants.

And now I think I understand why.

So none of this helps me talk to the bigger, faster, cheaper crowd. But it does help me clarify my personal ethics around these issues … and someday, maybe soon, I’ll know the right thing to say.

Peewee, not to be confused with P.G., hydrangea.

This baby hydrangea is the result of my very first lesson in propagation–right after Marc and I started dating in summer 2009. I blogged about a few of those lessons, way back in the day when it seemed kind of romantic that my kitchen had started to become an impromptu  horticulture laboratory.

More quickly than you might think I was to become jaded. But back then, the fact that I couldn’t turn around without knocking over a pot filled with something that looked  suspiciously like a dead twig didn’t bug me at all.  And all those plastic bags whose contents I might have wanted to toss on the compost because they seemed to hold nothing more than wilted produce? I’d get positively giddy at finding they were instead filled with precious cuttings from some rare viburnum developed in the eighteen-teens. Yeah, for real. That’s what love will do for you.

With all those experiments cooking, you can imagine that some went, shall we say, awry. The ones I was supposed to water, for example … well, the less said about those the better. But the one  I left completely to Mother Nature … well, as you see above, it was a spectacular success.

The technique the McVicker taught me is called layering and involves  picking a nice low-hanging branch, stripping off the leaves where it forks, and scoring it lightly with a thumbnail. Using an ordinary garden staple, you then  fix it in the ground. Add compost, a bit of mulch, a brick to keep it from moving around too much–and forget about it.

(Here are some of the pictures we took at the time. Oh, and my original blog post with the full description of  layering is here.)

Start with a staple…

Pick a likely branch and lay it flat to the ground …

Strip off the leaves and cover with soil…

The plant we used was a plain blue hydrangea, probably Nikko, that grows nearly waist high in summer and sets flower heads the size of cabbages. Since this is what the plant looks like in all its glory…

June 2010–a visual feast.

… I think you can see why I’d want it to reproduce!

But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea from looking at this plant. That is, I don’t want you to get the idea that living with a horticulturist means having the most beautiful yard on the block. The reality is … not so much. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, as the saying goes–the carpenter’s have no cupboards–and the landscape designer’s are waiting for mama to go outside and weed!

And that has not happened. To be scrupulously fair, I’m the one who’s not holding up my end. I had allowed my garden to go for at least two years before Baby moved in (that whole dissertation marathon). And afterwards, between his summer schedule and the crappy hours of the various soul-sucking “gap jobs” I worked while biding my time for the defense and the next academic job fair, the yard got very little attention.

So I was thrilled to see that the McVicker, after getting rained out of  attendance at the City Market on Saturday, was too wired to sit around the house but instead charged out into the yard in a hoodie–during a downpour, mind you.

When the sun came out later that afternoon, I stepped out to take a look around.  I was admiring the balance he’d gotten with just a few snips of the pruning shears on this plant …

Check out the balance on this pruning job.

And then, I noticed something off to the right. Something that looked suspiciously like  … Was it? Could it be?

There … off in the right corner…

It was.

A “peewee” hydrangea–a chip off the Nikko blue block!

So the next step is to pot it and nurse it along to a much juicier size … at which point we’ll either give it away, sell it, or find a nice spot in the yard.

But it was a lovely surprise, like a wish long forgotten that suddenly comes true. It’s nice to be reminded that they do that … come true, I mean.

Mel Gibson need not apply–this is the lethal weapon of choice in my kitchen.

They are, in short, all over the place. That’s how I found myself a woman in search of a lethal weapon.

Now some of you may be wondering what the big deal is. Just get a can of Raid, I can imagine you thinking, and let fly. Well, I don’t keep common household poisons around. Partly it’s due to the kitties–I don’t want them stepping in something that’ll harm them then licking it off their paws.  Partly, though, it’s just the (leftie, granola) principle of the thing. No pesticides in the garden! No pesticides in the house! has been my mantra and, living in central Virginia,  I’ve been able to indulge myself.

That’s because, unlike our less fortunate sister Southern states, we have this thing here called the “hard freeze” every winter, so the bugs act like they have some sense and remain a manageable size. In the 16 years I’ve lived in Charlottesville, I’ve never seen a roach. Seriously. And for a woman who spent years fending off monstrous tree roaches in Baton Rouge and “palmetto bugs” in Charleston (don’t be fooled by the cute name–they’re giant flying cockroaches!)–that means a whole lot.

But back to the ants. What’s been especially maddening has been the fact that my usual method of control–borax–has utterly failed. I’ve placed it in sugar, in honey. They’ve taken the bait … and nothing. The ant parade continues unabated.

The crisis came last week when I did something really dumb: left a saucer with part of a slice of chocolate cake from Baby’s birthday on the cutting board.  Now that was really asking for it. And boy did I get it. The counter was absolutely aswirl the next morning with a rotating pattern of ants, driven to delirium by the smell of all that sugar.

“That’s it!” I hollered. “That’s it! I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking this anymore!”

And I marched right out of the house and bought myself … a 1 oz. bottle of peppermint essential oil from Integral Yoga, the organic grocery store in the strip shopping center that backs up to my street.

What? You were thinking maybe … Raid?

As it happens, I didn’t had to find out if I’d ever stoop so low. That’s because the mint oil proved to be a seriously lethal weapon.

Let me back up a few steps to explain. Remember that companion planting scheme for the garden I wrote about last week? Well, while doing the research for that, I kept running across references to mint as an ant repellant–so I filed that little bit of information away for later reference.

Originally, I was puzzling over where to plant the mint outside–and whether to bring pots inside. Then, suddenly, during the crisis, it occurred to me to put mint oil in some soapy water and just spray the counters down with it.

That is precisely what I did on one side of the sink. When I awoke the next morning, the ant parade continued to the left of the sink. But the counters on the right side of the sink were clean as the board of health.

A few ants crept out of the woodwork when I started chopping onions for the next meal,  but I remained calm. I took my handy-dandy spray bottle and gave them a a couple of squirts. I was thinking that, at most, the ant parade would start marching away. Well, honey, I’m here to tell you those little critters stopped cold, curled up on their sides, and d-i-e-d.

Mind you, only one of those squirts was a direct hit. The other one only landed near the ant. Both of them died within seconds–at a fraction of the (monetary, environmental) cost of buying from some maker of household poison–you know, someone like the  global  operations of SC Johnson Brand Cos. et al. …

It was so easy. I used a solution of about a half cup of water, a dash of lemon Joy, and about 10 drops of mint essential oil–shaken then squirted on the counters and wiped dry with a paper towel. The solution was strong enough to make my eyes water briefly–but I never dreamed that it was strong enough to kill.

Anyway, I’m putting that one in the file with the other money-saving, environment-friendly household maintenance tips I’m starting to collect. Watch out, Heloise. The Goddess of Gumbo is nipping at your heels.