Poor Richard’s Almanac

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, here today to have a little chat with you about those wretched spelling bugabears, ”capital” and “capitol.” I’d invited our friend Ben and Silence Dogood out for dinner on their return from a weekend in our nation’s capital, and got quite an earful about their trip (as you did, too, if you read our friend Ben’s post “An encounter with history”). I of course felt that, after a weekend of great Thai food with their friend Susan and platters of gourmet delicacies at our friend Ben’s brother’s house, it was time to sober up with some good old-fashioned pizza.

While we were eating—trying, of course, not to hog too many slices; why is it that no matter how big the pizza, there never seems to be enough?! (”No, please, you take the last slice…”)—and Silence was talking about how beautiful and imposing the Capitol looked silhouetted against the setting sun, I began to wonder. Like you, I remembered that the seat of our Congress was spelled “Capitol,” while the city that housed our nation’s government, as well as all the cities that house our states’ governments, are spelled “capital.” But why?

I decided it was time to find out. Turns out that “Capitol” refers specifically to “a set of buildings in which a legislature meets,” and the spelling derives from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where the Roman Senate met. (Thank you, Wikipedia!) But how did the Roman hill receive its name? Not from the Senate, you may be sure! Strange as it may seem, the Capitoline Hill was named after a skull (Latin caput, head) uncovered during excavations for a Temple of Jupiter ordered by the fifth king of Rome, Tarquin the Elder, ca. 616-579 B.C. (This was one busy guy—he also was responsible for the construction of the Roman Forum and the Circus Maximus.)

If it strikes you as ironic that the Capitoline Hill in Rome and Golgotha, the “place of a skull” where those same Romans crucified Christ, are both named because of skulls found on their sites, let’s just say you aren’t alone. And our Capitol building shares that legacy today. Maybe if our Congressmen were more aware of this history, they’d take their responsibilities more seriously! The name of their building provides not just a link to the past, and a link to life and death via the skull symbolism, but also to God in the form of God the Father (Jupiter) and Jesus Christ. The word “Capitol” is a good reminder of both transience and eternity, and our tenuous place in the balance between them.

Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood have just returned from a whirlwind weekend in Washington, D.C. visiting family and friends. We had a great time, and would like nothing better than to hibernate for about a week now just to process everything we saw, but the garden and (gulp) deadlines make that a non-option. Before we plunge back into daily life, though, I want to share with you two of the amazing things we saw.

Our friend Ben is a Smithsonian junkie. I’ll be the first to admit it. The National Galleries, the Museum of Natural History, the Hirshhorn, the Sackler, the Freer—ah, yes, our friend Ben is ready to settle in and enjoy a lengthy season of exploration, much to the dismay of, well, pretty much everyone. Silence and our good friend Susan had agreed to indulge our friend Ben yet again this weekend, and Susan dutifully drove us all over toward the Mall (as the two long rows of museum buildings and the broad strip of ground that runs between them is called, ironically indeed in this age of strip malls with their tedious low-end chain stores). But as always, parking proved to be an issue, and by the time Susan captured an empty space, we found ourselves in front of the National Archives building.

National Archives, what’s that? Another of the many government buildings crowded thickly in the District’s downtown? How nice. Can we move on now? Our friend Ben had climbed out of the car and was basically waiting for Susan and Silence to assemble themselves when my eye fell on a large banner on the Archives building, announcing that you could see the original documents of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights inside. Our friend Ben’s head started swimming. I faintly heard a voice, belonging, I belatedly realized, to Silence (always at least one step ahead of our friend Ben), asking Susan if in fact the famous documents were in the National Archives building and, if so, could we see them?

Now, our friend Ben is admittedly not the brightest bulb on the string, but I’d never heard of the National Archives. If you had asked me, I’d have said that the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights, if they were on display at all, would have been under glass in our nation’s Capitol building, where our illustrious Senators and Representatives could view them daily to remind themselves of what the bleep they were doing there to begin with. Not so, my friends, my fellow citizens, my colleagues worldwide.

If you have a hankering, like Silence and our friend Ben, to see the originals of the famous documents that shaped the nascent United States out of a bunch of disparate British colonies, they’re on display in the National Archives building and are free for all to see. Who’d'a thunk?!! We rushed across the street and lined up to see the very foundations of America.

And yes, there they were. The thrill of seeing the signatures of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, and others was beyond description for a Colonial- and Federal-era enthusiast like our friend Ben. Knowing as I do that another of my favorite Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris, actually composed and wrote the Constitution (despite a publicity grab by Madison enthusiasts to designate him “Father of the Constitution”), and seeing the actual writing on the document, which was his, sent chills down my spine. Yes! Yes!!! Go Gouverneur!!!!!

Believe it or not, there were thrills and shocks aplenty in the short time our friend Ben, Silence, and Susan had to check out the National Archives before they closed. On the plus side, they had one of the four copies of the British Magna Carta, dating to 1295, on display. The Magna Carta is crucial to the British, of course, but it’s also of vital significance to Americans, since without it, our country could never have become what it was and is. To look at the near-microscopic but unbelievably, elegantly precise writing of the Magna Carta was to almost experience a time-warp: How could anyone create such minute, perfect, exquisite writing at all, much less with a quill pen? Ah, ah, impossible!

Other thrills included the many documents beside the “big three” that shaped American history: the Articles of Confederation, our first stab at a constitution; the Emancipation Proclamation; JFK’s inaugural address; and thousands more. The National Archives is truly a national treasure. 

And the shock? Oh, dear, it was the condition of the Declaration of Independence, the foundation of our freedom. The document those brave men, John Hancock and the others, signed so brazenly, had become almost invisible in time. Men who risked their very lives to sign the document (as our hero, Ben Franklin, so wonderfully pointed out to laggards, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately”) would not be able to decipher it today, so faint has the ink become. Oh, no, no, our great document! Can no one save it?!

Mercifully, offsetting the horror of the almost-invisible Declaration of Independence was the fine, decisive script of Gouverneur Morris on the Constitution. It was marvellous! Our friend Ben will doubtless post on Gouverneur Morris at some point—he, with Franklin, Hamilton, and (of course) Washington—are the Revolutionaries who capture both my imagination and my admiration. And here’s a tidbit for you Thomas Jefferson fans—unlike the ornate script of other Founders, the writing of Jefferson in his notebooks detailing the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition struck our friend Ben as astonishingly modern. Hmmm. Our friend Ben leaves each of you to make of that what you will.

At any rate, seeing these seminal documents of my country, seeing them unexpectedly as I did, was an incredible experience for our friend Ben (and for Silence, too). If you enjoy American history, please don’t wait like our friend Ben to see the National Archives display. Go as soon as you can! Make it a vacation destination. You’ll be so glad you did!

As if that weren’t enough of a historical high, our friend Ben and Silence had to drive past Gettysburg to return from Washington to our Pennsylvania home. So of course we stopped at the Gettysburg Battlefield to look out over the decisive battlefield of the Civil War. (Who on earth decided to call that bloody horror “civil,” anyway?!) We even got to see some reenactors firing off a cannon (ouch!!! cover your ears), and of course we went to the visitors’ center to check out the displays. The whole thing was pretty awesome, and Silence managed to snag a cookbook containing Robert E. Lee family recipes. (Our friend Ben is related to both Abe Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, and would have preferred a Lincoln family cookbook, but no luck.) Anyway, I’m sure you’ll hear from Silence if she decides to try any of the Lee family recipes.

For now, we’re wiped out from our exciting weekend, but we enthusiastically enourage you to see the treasures at the National Archives building if you’re in Washington, and of course to stop in Gettysburg if you’re in that part of Pennsylvania. Talk about an encounter with history! Our friend Ben is still reeling.                           

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, back today to continue our discussion of dollars and sense—or, in this case, of gold, fraud, and cents. Five cents, to be exact. (If you’ve missed my previous posts on intriguing facts about U.S. coinage, see “Can a penny be saved?”, “Big bucks and silver dollars,” and “Don’t accept any wooden nickels.”)

Let’s start with some interesting facts about gold. Gold was indeed the “gold standard” of U.S. coinage until 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt demanded that U.S. citizens turn in their gold coins to the government and single-handedly brought about the end of an era, an era that had ironically seen its fullest flowering with the beautiful gold coins commissioned by his cousin Teddy Roosevelt. (Fortunately for coin collectors, they weren’t all melted down, and many are available on the coin market today.) But before FDR, any citizen could use gold coins as legal tender, and there was a wide range of them available, from teensy little bits of “fractional” gold (i.e., fractions of a dollar, such as 50 cents) to hefty $20 gold pieces the size of today’s quarters, but about as thick as two of them stuck together.

Gold coins have been minted in the U.S. since the early days of the Republic, starting in 1795. But they didn’t become widely available until gold was discovered in California and the Gold Rush, which began in earnest in 1849 (remember those Forty-Niners?), made gold more plentiful. Okay, so where did it come from before that?

Believe it or not, our early gold coinage came out of the South. Let me test your memory here: How many mints are there in the U.S.? If you came up with three—Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco—that’s not bad. But there’s actually a fourth, West Point, which produces American Eagle silver and gold bullion coins. However, there have been other mints, as the U.S. government tried to keep pace with Westward expansion. At one time, both New Orleans and Carson City had U.S. mints. But let’s get back to the gold. Denver wasn’t the first mint to put a “D” on their coins. That honor goes to the mint in Dahlonega, Georgia. Pre-gold rush gold coins were minted there and in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Gold coins from Dahlonega and Charlotte don’t look a whole lot like gold as we think of it today, that rich, red-gold color of California gold. The early Southern coinage was more of a pale, green-gold color. Most people never saw it anyway, though, since the common coins were silver dollars, half-dollars, quarter-dollars, dimes, and half-dimes, and copper pennies. (Two- and three-cent coins wouldn’t come along until later, but that’s another story.)

What do I mean, half-dimes? The earliest five-cent pieces were small silver coins called half-dimes, or, in their earliest incarnations, half-dismes. But these little pieces of silver were easy to lose. So in 1866, the mint produced a 5-cent piece that was much bigger—almost the size of today’s nickel—in a copper-nickel composition (that’s what our nickels are still made of today), and the “nickel” was born. It must be admitted that this new form of coinage was no thing of beauty, however. In the spirit of Civil War victory, the coin displayed a shield on one side and a big “5″ surrounded by stars and rays, then just stars, on the reverse, with “cents” at the bottom. The public, already being asked to give up a silver coin for base metal, was also being asked to accept an ugly, boring coin. But the design endured until 1883, when the mint decided it was time for a design upgrade.

And that’s where gold, greed, and good old American opportunism re-enter the picture. You see, the mint made a terrible mistake. The new coin, now the comparatively hefty size of today’s nickel, bore the bust of a rather bovine Lady Liberty on the front and the Roman numeral “V” surrounded by a wreath on the back. But in streamlining the design of the back and upgrading the previous “5″ to the more elegant Roman numeral, they left off the humble “cents” that had previously appeared in the lower part of the design.

It didn’t occur to the mint in those days to launch new coins with publicity campaigns like the ones that accompanied the release of our state quarters or the Lewis & Clark commemorative nickel series. It just made the coins and sent them out into the vast and still not entirely charted expanse of America, where news travelled slowly, a lot more slowly than unscrupulous con men.

Here’s what happened: The mint, doubtless delighted to have gotten that ugly shield off the five-cent piece and anticipating a warm reception from the public, pumped out almost 5.5 million of the new nickels. And the con men, ever alert to new opportunities, got busy right away. American citizens weren’t familiar with the new coins. They had a big old “V” on the back. There was nothing on there to indicate that this meant “5 cents.” The crooks simply had to dip them in a thin coat of gold and—voila!—they had big, hefty, shiny $5 gold pieces to put into circulation in exchange for goods or currency or change that were actually worth five dollars. It was a thief’s bonanza.

Let’s put the scam in perspective. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the annoying tendency of store clerks to run some kind of Magic Marker over your $20 bills to see if they’re counterfeits before accepting them when you’re trying to make a purchase. (Hey! Since you got them out of the ATM to begin with, isn’t it the bank’s fault if they’re counterfeits, not yours?!) But even if they find that your $20 is no good, it isn’t the end of the world. In 1883, however, it might have made the difference between making it through the week and going hungry. The average salary at that time was less than $1,000—in many cases, a lot less. Suppose you made a whopping $600 a year. If somebody pawned off a worthless “$5″ coin on you, that would be almost half a week’s wages!

Fortunately, the mint woke up to what was going on. They quickly brought out over 16 million new nickels that same year, with the same basic design but an important modification: Under the wreath, the word “cents” appeared. The scam artists were out of luck. They had to go back to trying to counterfeit actual gold pieces, which required a lot of skill, as opposed to just dipping coins in gold plate. The bonanza was over.

The mint continued to make nickels with the Liberty design until 1913, when they introduced James Earle Fraser’s marvelous buffalo nickel. (And there’s an incredible story about that, but I’ll save it for another post.) Today’s collectors can find the original 1883 “V” nickel and the 1883-1912 ”V” with “cents” nickels, which, except for the years 1885, 1886, and 1912S, are very reasonably priced. And, if you’re really lucky, you might also be able to find one of the gold-plated 1883 nickels as well. I have a little collection of fake coins, and I was able to find one locally for a pretty reasonable price. You, too, can enjoy owning this little oddity of American history. Just remember: Don’t accept any wooden nickels (or gold ones, either!).        

Silence Dogood here. Our friend Ben and I are mad about mushrooms. Here at Hawk’s Haven, we often eat mushrooms five days a week. We love all kinds of mushrooms—buttons, shiitakes, criminis, baby bellas and portobellas, oysters, you name it—and feel blessed that we can find so many kinds in our local grocery stores. But our favorite way to buy mushrooms is at our local farmers’ market, where they’re piled high in bins and boxes rather than imprisoned in plastic wrap. (Seeing mushrooms squashed in plastic wrap always reminds us of that great scene in “The Full Monty” where the Dave character is trying to lose weight by encasing his ample gut in plastic wrap. Somehow, it’s just not right.)  

We find that mushrooms and sweet onions (such as Walla Walla, Candy and Vidalia types) are a perfect pairing, and we seldom eat one without the other. We’ll saute diced onions and sliced mushrooms in butter, then fold them into an omelette with shredded Swiss cheese. (Of course, the eggs are just collected that morning, still warm from the nest. Thanks, chickens!) Add half a grapefruit or a thick slice of ripe melon and some dense multigrain bread or crusty baguette with butter and marmalade or jam, and life is good! Another favorite breakfast dish where we often add mushrooms is our Hawk’s Haven Huevos Rancheros (see my earlier post, “Fiesta time! It’s Cinco de Mayo!” for the recipe).

We don’t usually eat mushrooms for lunch, unless we’re having pizza, since neither of us can bear the dusty, musty, catch-in-your-throat texture of raw mushrooms in a salad (eeeewww, what are people thinking?!). But once suppertime rolls around, ahhhh. It’s mushroom time again! Mushrooms add depth to our curries, stir-fries, and spaghetti sauces. One of our favorite sides is grilled mushrooms, slices of sweet onion, and red sweet peppers, brushed with olive oil and topped with salt (of course) and a little basil or oregano. We especially love stuffing the mushroom caps with pesto before grilling them. We have a LeCreuset grilling pan, so we can grill the veggies in the oven as well as outside, making this a year-round treat. Served over rice or mounded next to a fluffy baked potato, this simple dish is our idea of heaven!

Another great, easy way to feature mushrooms in a starring role is to sautee a mess of mushrooms (I like to combine as many as four kinds in this dish to add some subtle complexity to the flavor) and sweet onions in butter, then add a generous splash or two (or three) of Madeira or Marsala wine and reduce the sauce over low heat until it’s about the consistency of maple syrup. If I feel like upping the ante, I’ll sometimes add a dollop of bourbon as well, which gives the finished sauce a truly rich and complex flavor. (Even though the alcohol itself evaporates during cooking, removing any possible intoxicating effects, I wouldn’t serve this one to kids.) It is so easy, and it’s luscious over rice or pasta. We love my Red, White and Gold Pasta Sauce, a kid-friendly recipe featuring mushrooms, sweet onions, red and yellow or orange bell peppers, sour cream, and shredded white Cheddar, too. Yum!!! To complete my trio of quick-n-easy sauces, there is Mushroom-Cashew Stroganoff. I’ll give you the recipe for that in a sec.

But first, let’s talk about storing mushrooms. We usually try to buy a week’s worth at a time, and we want to keep that beautiful, just-picked texture. So when we get them home, I pour them out onto paper towels, wrap them in the towels, and then store them, towels and all, in the vegetable crisper in paper bags. Unless it’s hot and humid out, I find that they’ll also keep well in their paper towels and bags in the mudroom. If you buy yours in those plastic-wrapped containers, unless you’re planning to use them right away, I’d suggest taking them out of the plastic and paper-bagging them, or at least removing the plastic wrap from the container so they can breathe. If you buy pre-sliced, though, you should keep them in their plastic wrap to keep the slices from drying out. (Unless, of course, you’d like to spread them out on a dehydrator sheet and dry them to use later in soups and sauces. Easy!) Whatever you do, don’t wash your mushrooms until just before you use them. Anybody out there have great mushroom-storage tips to share? I for one would love to hear them!

Now, about that recipe. A version of this was a favorite dish at the cafeteria in one of the companies where our friend Ben worked. I’ve tweaked it a bit, and now it’s one of the most asked-for dishes I cook. It’s so rich and satisfying, and so easy to put together, you can see why! Serve it over fettucine with a salad (Caesar salad is especially good with this) and a glass of wine, and you have a practically instant meal. (Note that, as with most of my recipes, quantities are approximate; you can add more mushrooms and/or onion to taste.)

        Mushroom-Cashew Stroganoff

1 large sweet onion (Vidalia or Walla Walla type), diced

2 cartons button mushrooms, sliced

small carton sour cream (2 cups; you can use regular or light)

tamari soy sauce (we prefer the deeper, mellower taste of tamari to the sometimes tinny flavor of regular soy sauce)

1 cup roasted, salted cashews, or more to taste

extra-virgin olive oil

Heat a pot of water to boiling for the pasta. In a heavy sauce pan or Dutch oven, saute the onion and mushrooms in olive oil until the onions have clarified and the mushrooms are cooked. Reduce heat and stir in sour cream. (I suggest starting with one cup and adding more until you reach the perfect, creamy consistency.) Add at least a half-cup of tamari—your goal is a rich brown roast-beef-gravy color. Add fettucine to boiling water. Continue stirring the sauce, adding more sour cream as needed, to create a rich, thick topping. Add cashews to sauce just before serving and stir well to mix.

That’s all there is to it! You can make as much or as little as you want, depending on how many people you’re feeding and how much they can eat.

Ever wanted to grow your own mushrooms? We finally got a chance to try it last year when a friend, who’s good friends with some gourmet mushroom growers, got some of their bags of spent mushroom straw and shared a couple of bags with us. They were long, tubelike plastic bags filled with densely packed straw that had been moistened and inoculated with the mushroom mycelium. The growers had cut slits in the sides of the bags so the mushrooms could develop. Even though these bags had already produced their main harvest, they still yielded some delicious mushrooms for us. Best of all, when they stopped producing, we could simply compost the straw! This year, logs inoculated with button and shiitake mushroom “spawn” are on my birthday list. If any of you have grown your own, please do tell all!

                     ‘Til next time,

                                Silence           

Our friend Ben is going to try to rise to the level needed to elegize a great horse, the filly Eight Belles, who was destroyed on the track of Churchill Downs on Saturday after a magnificent run in the Kentucky Derby. Please don’t hold it against me if I fail to rise high enough; I know it’s going to be very hard to do. But Silence Dogood has asked me to try, and try I shall, problematic as it is, painful as it is, inadequate as any tribute must be.

As you know if you love horse racing, Eight Belles came in second in the Derby after the magnificent stallion Big Brown. Big Brown is an exceptional thoroughbred, and our friend Ben and Silence by no means wish to diminish the glory of his victory. But had he not been in the race, the filly Eight Belles would have won, only the fourth filly ever to have done so, only the 39th filly ever to have raced in the Derby in its 132-year history, defeating a field of fullblooded stallions to claim her victory.

Her performance was exceptional. Her performance was extraordinary. But it was not altogether unexpected, given her descent from Northern Dancer, given her three-for-three previous wins, one by 13 1/2 lengths over another field of stallions. If “heart” were a precious metal, Eight Belles would be the gold standard. What was unexpected was that after crossing the finish line, in the cool-down segment of the track, Eight Belles would collapse, both front ankles shattered, and that the track vet would euthanize her where she lay.

Sic transit gloria mundi. God damn them!!! Silence is sitting beside me weeping as I write. Why, you might ask: Wasn’t it just a horse? Not to us, no, not “just” an anything. How can I put you in the picture? Perhaps a montage of images:

* Our friend Ben’s Kentucky clan, grandparents on down, gathered annually for the big day, Derby Day, clustered around the television with mint juleps for the adults and iced tea with fresh mint sprigs and simple syrup for the youthful Ben and siblings, eagerly discussing the horses, tracing their histories, discussing the triumphs of their ancestors and of their jockeys, the excitement building hour by hour until the starting gates crashed open.

* The girl Silence, tears streaming down her face, not because she was sorry for the horses but because the pure beauty of their running, like the beauty of pure soprano singing or the violin or ballet or any great art, was more than she could bear.

* The adult Silence, refusing to go with our friend Ben to friends’ houses to watch the Derby because she knew she would weep again at its beauty, and also knew the friends would never understand.

* Our friend Ben, speaking to every horse on every country drive, knowing them all by sight, appreciating their uniqueness, their colors, their configuration.

* Our friend Ben and Silence, rejoicing in the book Horse, Follow Closely by GaWaNi Pony Boy with its joyous communion of horse and human and its glorious photos celebrating that communion.

* Our friend Ben ruefully recounting how successful my ancestors were at mule-breeding and what dismal failures they were at breeding thoroughbreds. (Many humorous and humiliating tales to tell there! We should have stuck with mules.)

* Silence recalling how, as a girl at summer horse camp, she was riding a good-natured horse named Beauty when a novice camp counsellor, thinking that Beauty wasn’t going fast enough, came up behind the horse and brought her crop down hard against her flank. Silence coming to on the ground with Beauty reared up above her so she wouldn’t crush her by coming down.

* Our friend Ben recalling the first time riding a horse and letting it run, really run, out of a canter, out of a gallop, into a straight-out run, where horse and rider and wind and ground merged into something unlike any other experience there is.

Horses. They are the wind’s gift to man, the wind made flesh. We can never deserve them, we can only be grateful. We can only accept a gift unlooked for, a gift we can never repay.

And thus we come back to Eight Belles, that great heart, that great horse. Our friend Ben and Silence would have been devastated by her fate in any case. But then one of those synchronicities happened again. Silence received, at about the same time, one of those feel-good e-mails about a pony who’d damaged its front leg. There was no way to save the leg, and the vets considered euthanasia. But instead, they and the pony’s owners felt that this friendly creature deserved a second chance at a happy life. They amputated the lower leg, but replaced it with a prosthesis. Not only has the pony adjusted beautifully, but it’s now a poster horse for human therapy, using animals to put the heart back into gravely ill adults and children and nursing-home residents who often don’t receive a lot in the way of love and touch.

Well and well. If even an anonymous pony could be given a second chance, couldn’t Eight Belles? True, she would never have run again. True, she would never have made her syndicate owners bazillion dollars pumping out foals. But hadn’t she already earned her right to what was left of a good life? What horse, against such unbelievable odds, could possibly have done more?

I sing you the song of Eight Belles. I sing you the song of a filly, who, against all odds, put her heart out and made that great heart fly. I sing you the song of a horse who rose to meet the expectations of men. Of the men who considered her disposable, I do not sing. My own heart cannot bear the thought of it.            

Our friend Ben is enduring quite a bit of abuse from Silence Dogood at the moment. In particular, Silence is wondering if three posts in one day are really necessary. (”Despite your aspirations, Ben, people actually have other things to do than sit here reading Poor Richard’s Almanac posts! Couldn’t you wait ’til tomorrow to post this and, say, get back to work instead?!”) Well, um, actually, no.

After all, our friend Ben just fired off a post, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” attacking weeds. So it seems only fair to champion an ornamental plant that most consider a weed, pokeweed (Phytolacca americana). Pokeweed is the source of the famous poke sallet, sometimes called “poke salad,” though it’s actually a cooked dish comprised of new leaves and shoots of pokeweed boiled, then drained and cooked with bacon grease or fatback. Now, poke sallet is supposed to be delicious, not to mention the ultimate spring tonic. But our friend Ben has never tried it. The knowledge that mature poke leaves, stems, roots, and berries are poisonous gives me pause. If I want cooked greens, I’ll stick to spinach, thanks.

However. Our friend Ben knows of no plant—no plant, hear me now—that is more decorative than pokeweed. The plants emerge from the ground a beautiful red-green about now in our corner of Pennsylvania. They grow into 4- to 5-foot-tall herbaceous shrubs, with lush foliage. Then they produce long, wild-cherry-like sprays of white flowers followed by delightful berries that are green, then rose, and finally a deep purple-black. As frost sets in, the foliage turns the most stunning red-purple. For three-season splendor, you could hardly ask for more from any plant. Once the stems dry and bleach blond in winter, cut them at ground level and compost them, then wait for the show to start again in spring.

Our friend Ben is not (mercifully) the only one who loves pokeweed for its decorative properties. Our good friend Nancy Ondra recently posted about the variegated pokeweed cultivar ‘Silberstein’ on her wonderful blog, Hayefield (see our blogroll for a link). Nan generously offered to share a plant with our friend Ben and I can’t wait to try it!

But variegated or plain, pokeweed deserves a place in the shrub border. You’ll never see a more beautiful plant.     

Okay, we’ll admit it: Here at Hawk’s Haven, we’re huge Conan fans. We love “Conan the Barbarian,” and Silence Dogood also loves “Conan the Destroyer,” though our friend Ben is less enamoured of this second Conan movie. Not that we wouldn’t both love to see many, many more! Too bad Arnold Schwarzenegger had to go off and become Governor of California instead of making Conan sequels.

Springtime always reminds our friend Ben of Conan’s leitmotif, Friedrich Nietsche’s “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” because, while I have some doubts about its application to people, there’s not even a shred of doubt in my mind that it applies to weeds. Dandelions, garlic mustard, Norway maple seedlings, celandine poppies, poison ivy, oriental bittersweet, pigweed, dock, lamb’s-quarters, solanum, bindweed, multiflora rose, sumac, some horrific polygonum from Japan that floated down the stream one day and set up shop on our banks: Hawk’s Haven certainly has its share of invasives. And of course there are also those plants that have simply overstepped their bounds, fine in their place but a nightmare in our gardens: English ivy, pachysandra, lawn grass, lilies, jewelweed, trumpetvine, monarda, goldenrods, tansy, teasel, bamboo, rose-of-Sharon.

Ack!!! One hardly knows where to begin. And no sooner have you managed to weed out one invader and moved on to the next when, horror of horrors, the first one is making a comeback! We’re organic gardeners here, so herbicides are out of the question. We go out in the gardens and pull. And then we typically give the results of our efforts to our chickens or our compost piles, unless they spread by creeping stems, in which case they’re tossed onto the lawn to dry and die. But a lot of weeds seem to enjoy pulling back. (Thank God we don’t have thistles here, the absolute worst in this respect.) And in a tug of war with nature, nature usually wins. So we’ve settled for staying one step ahead and girding ourselves for next year’s battles, because we know that, like spring itself, those weeds are going to come back.

Mercifully, spring offers the gardener some consolation in the form of self-sown seedlings from desirable plants as well. Just yesterday, our friend Ben was delighted to see that new clumps of European wild ginger (Asarum europaeum) and pulmonaria had appeared in the shaded side garden. Hellebore, hosta, and white-flowered bleeding heart seedlings had sprung up all over a small circle of highly unsatisfactory shaded lawn. (I’ve already posted about the old-fashioned bleeding heart seedlings, now handsome plants in their own right, that colonized the foundation borders in front of the house.) Even our peonies exhibit this tendency to volunteer and add to the Hawk’s Haven floral display.

So the cycle continues, the annual battle against the invaders, the annual rejoicing at the appearance of unexpected pleasures. Now that our friend Ben thinks about it, I guess that which does not kill us gardeners makes us stronger, after all.             

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post to say a huge, happy ”thank you!!!” to Deb of Aunt Debbi’s Garden (http://auntdebbisgarden.blogspot.com/) for saying such wonderful things about us and Poor Richard’s Almanac in her post, “Blogs I Dig.” (And for putting us in such great company, too!) Aunt Debbi’s posts make us laugh, and we love that. We love reading about her “putting the fear of Mom” into one of her kids, sending her spouse, Manly Man, out to do battle with a rosebush that’s attacking the local schoolbus (it’s not clear who won), or spending bazillion dollars to establish a good home for some “free” tadpoles, then watching in horror as a kid falls into the new water garden, the cats decide that she’s set out an all-you-can-eat sushi bar just for them, and then the tadpoles mysteriously disappear… because they’ve eaten each other. We can’t wait to read Aunt Debbi’s latest adventures and misadventures, and we know you’ll enjoy them, too. Just don’t try reading her posts while you’re drinking coffee! We’re still trying to get the stains out of our shirts.  

Our friend Ben is sitting here in the Hawk’s Haven home office, trying to concentrate on an editing assignment. But this is difficult because of what’s going on outside. No, I don’t mean the beautiful spring day just begging me to come out and relax on the deck, the greenhouse and gardens calling for attention, or the goldfinches flocking to the feeders. Our friend Ben is talking about the noise.

People think that country life is quiet, but nothing could be further from the truth. At this moment, a farmer is pulling a raucous piece of equipment through the field in front of our house. Next door, our neighbor is running his chainsaw. The neighbor on the other side is riding his mower across his yard for what seems like the third time this week. (Perhaps he’s trying to give our friend Ben, whose lawn-mowing efforts are casual at best, a subtle hint.) In the field behind our property, bull calves are lowing loudly in what sounds ominously like a “please don’t eat us” plea. And this is just the beginning.

Motorcycle cavalcades roar regularly along the tiny backroad in front of our friend Ben’s home, having discovered this scenic rural “tour route.” Rifle fire blasts frequently across our friend Ben’s synapses, as farmers practice for hunting season or actually take to the fields and woods shooting. (Our friend Ben goes around for months in terror for our deer-sized, deer-colored golden retriever Molly’s life.) Our friend Ben knows that, when the farm day is done, the farm families will take to their fields, roaring over them in groups on ATVs like some post-apocalyptic film set, though, rather than cresting the hill in order to wipe out the Hawk’s Haven family, they’re just relaxing before dark. And, of course, this doesn’t even touch on the sonic boom of the jets passing overhead, the thump-thump of the news and medical helicopters, and the relatively frequent and terrifying rat-tat-tat of the military helicopters, black and always flying in formation.

No, the country isn’t quiet. It’s no bouquet for the nose, either. Our friend Ben has to rush poor Molly back inside when the farmers are spraying toxic herbicides and other chemicals on their fields, the curious, throat-grabbing sensation of the smell making me feel like we’re being napalmed. (The poor chickens!) And of course, the stench of freshly manured fields is a sewage-like smell all its own, described by one cynical colleague as “Mennonite in Paris” after the equally stinky perfume “Evening in Paris.” (We are actually fortunate to have many Mennonite and Amish farmers in this area.) Mind you, as you know if you’ve ever smelled it, neither cow nor horse manure smells bad, per se—all that forage gives both a distinctive sweetish smell. It’s when cows, and especially pigs, have been confined in barns all winter, with their manure piled up and unable to dry out or compost, that it reeks. Agh!!! It takes several weeks for the fields to lose that spread-manure stench. Kinda hard to take when your own yard is ablaze with flowers and you want to go outside and smell them, not pig, uh, excrement. 

So what’s my point here? It’s simply this: That what country living offers is not some return to the primeval Garden. Your neighbors are still trying to make a living, and they’re doing it in a noisy, sometimes stinky, way. If you’re moving from the suburbs, the gunfire will make you think you’ve stumbled into “Deliverance;” if you’re fleeing urban life, you can console yourself with the thought that at least no robbery, vandalism, or gang fighting is involved.

Instead, what country living offers is space: Space to spread out, to free yourself. Spacious, amazing views stretching out in in every direction. Space to live your life free of neighbors’ walls and windows on every side of your home, or neighbors crashing around over your head, below your feet, and on all sides of your suspended apartment/condo cube. Space uncluttered by the endless petty restrictions of condo boards and neighborhood regulations. (What do you mean, no veggies, no chickens?!) Space to free your mind, to think, to see. To be. Our friend Ben thinks that’s worth a little pig manure.       

Our friend Ben is not what you’d call a morning person. As James Herriot put it, “I am not at my best in the morning.” In fact, I’m more of a dusk person. Colleagues have told me I actually look different in the afternoon. No doubt they’re noticing that our friend Ben’s hulking Mr. Hyde-like morning persona has finally completed its transformation into something more closely resembling the civilized Dr. Jekyll.

(Fellow gardeners, you may wonder with our friend Ben why Robert Louis Stevenson chose the surname of one of gardening’s icons, Gertrude Jekyll, for the protagonist of his ghoulish tale. It does lead one to wonder whether Mr. Stevenson happened to know any foul-tempered members of the Jekyll clan, or was merely struck by the name, or if in fact it was just coincidence. One website, The Victorian Web, claims that it was used as a clue to the character’s suicidal tendencies, “Je” from the French, “I,” and “kyll” for “kill.” This seems like a stretch to our friend Ben, especially given the name’s pronunciation, which I understand is properly jeekle, not jeckle or jeckill. But I digress.)

Thus, anything that can bring a smile to the zombified, Shaun-of-the-Dead-like early morning face of our friend Ben is a good thing. (Silence Dogood claims it’s more like a miracle.) And one thing that often does is the list of search engine terms that people use to find our blog, Poor Richard’s Almanac. WordPress hosts our blog, and it allows you to see what words and phrases people use each day that direct them to you. (Thanks, WordPress!) Of course, most of them are very straightforward: the two most popular for this blog are “ben ten” and “poor richard’s almanac.” But because the blog’s scope is fairly broad, people come to it by all kinds of roads.

Many of the search engine terms lead our friend Ben to conclude that students are searching the web for stuff to put in their term papers. Our friend Ben wonders what they make of it when they search for Robert Frost’s “Nature’s first green is gold,” for example, and end up staring at one of our friend Ben’s rants. Then there are the people who are looking for very specific information, answers to practical questions or dilemmas. Our friend Ben is relieved when I see that, in fact, the post they’ve been directed to answers those questions, and I feel bad if I can see that it doesn’t. I hope they had better luck elsewhere! There are sometimes questions that our friend Ben would also like to know the answers to, such as “who invented Amish friendship bread,” and the occasional topic I wish we’d actually written, like “ben ten party food ideas.”

But, almost daily, there are also searches that strike our friend Ben as screamingly funny. These range from “little richard’s almanac” to this morning’s classic, “infant swallowed copper-plated steel coin.” We’ve had sweeping generalizations like “cats are brown,” bizarre juxtapositions like “african greys and radishes” and “radish seeds and caffeine,” eccentric arrivals such as “lola loves rick,” “blue cat statue in yard,” and “do yellow snails need blubber.” We’ve gotten “nutritional value of vegetable peels” and “crazy ben franklin quotes” (poor old Ben, he gets no respect).

One search that recently received a One-Ben Lifetime Award was “revenge of the bread, the Amish strike.” Haaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!! Not only is it great in its entirety, but “Revenge of the Bread” is just begging to be turned into a Wallace & Gromit classic. (Tragically, our friend Ben just discovered on a trip over to Nick Park’s official Wallace & Gromit website, www.wallaceandgromit.com, that Nick is even now at work on a film called ”A Matter of Loaf and Death,” so clearly it isn’t in the cards. Rats!!!)

A great big “thank you” to every search-engine user who brightens our friend Ben’s day. Keep ‘em coming, please! But I fear we already have a grand prize winner, the person who submitted “poor richard will do anything for money.” Our good friend and fellow blog contributor Richard Saunders is never going to live that one down—at least, not if our friend Ben and Silence have anything to say about it!