Thyme Enough

Prim and flower-sprigged when planted in April, now the thyme is gushing out of its pot like bosoms out a bodice, like foam out of a stein, crazy like a troll head, gobbling up its basil neighbor and eying the tarragon pot next door.
"Sweet in spring, beer and boobs by summer," says B, watering the sun-trounced garden at 1 and 95 degrees, "Yeah....troll-headed gusto: the sign of a good garden."

But what to do with it all? We've eaten hanks! Hauled in dewy in the evening, chopped blossoms and all, to mound over chicken thighs baked in clay or roasted stewing with the carrots and garlicky olive oil. We're sprinkling it on melon and honey: a little hairy while chewing, but deliciously fragrant too. A mouthful of thyme and watermelon brings both the cool melon belly of the cultivated garden and wild, baked hay field together and right up your nose - and with the fork still in your mouth, you're in an old walled garden, English, I'd say, sitting in wicker in a grass-grown orchard.

But wicker sitting garnish is too coy for my supply. Careful to keep a little shower of blossoms in reserve for the bees, the exuberant plant is so densely matted, we can cut it from below without making a gouge, we nibble it absently while reading on the deck, we pinch it just to sniff it as we go by, bringing bruised leaves to each other across the garden saying, "Here. Smell." and holding a hands under a nose. The other one says, "Ah. Thyme. Yes. Nice." It seems all the better for the hedge clippers. We think it likes us to eat it.

If that's the case, we've been trying to accommodate and learn something about it, since we're eating it, writing about it, taking its picture, reading by its side, sitting with it in the evening as the robins chuckle good night.

Today, while we lunched (the thyme stood up to and then held hands with a burly tomato and cumin curry full of sweet potatoes, carrots, celery, and onion mounded in a bowl of brown rice and raw spinach doused with a sluice of soy and orange juice) we wandered, bowl in hand, around the library and Web looking for Thyme lore.

Field to Fork Talks African and Heirloom

The 1902 Carnegie Library that houses the Washington DC Historic Society is a Beaux-Arts bon-bon box with a copper roof, marble columns, and, that day, hundreds of people in hand-dyed wool and well-worn Merrell's talking about urban agriculture, land-sharing, suburban agriculture, heirloom seeds, native tree planting, "Food as Social Justice", double-digging, and the Beauty of Earthworms - all things green and spring.

We heard Yao Afachao, of UDC, talk about the newly resuscitated (really, we thought it was dead) university's agriculture extension efforts working with former tobacco farmers in Maryland to grow alternative crops that serve the culinary desires of African and Latin communities.

In the newly revamped, but still-echo-y, museum space - which is gorgeously gilded and there are lit from below maps in the floor - Yao showed slides of Maryland fields full of eggplant cultivars from Togo. They're lime green and the size apricots. You can eat them raw. They're growing among acres of chiles - crazy hot and sweetly tangy, solanaceous greens called njama jama, and a beautiful Avuvo: slender, blossomed, with edible leaves, called "the husband stealer." Yum.

We heard Tony Cohen's - so smooth from years thinking and talking about food, history, slavery, and freedom. Dazzling photos - some from the Smithsonian magazine's documentation of his walk as a graduate student in the 90s following the Underground Railroad from Sandy Springs, Maryland to the border of Canada.

Then many many photos from summery Button Farm (http://www.menare.org/buttonfarm.html) - 200-year-old, 70-acre farm, lost in the center of Seneca Creek Park - his Dream-Made-Reality Living History Center in Germantown, Maryland. The Center features retreats in which participants (families, individuals, corporate team-building groups) immerse themselves in 19th century rural life in America. That immersion can be a dunking or a dabble, choosing characters black, white, rich, or poor. He said, "It doesn't matter what color you are. People, at the end, call the experience 'freeing'. Everybody's a slave to something."

He talked about Oprah Winfrey (his slide showed her immaculately coiffed and glossy in watered silk and pearls). In preparing for her film role in T. Morrison's Beloved, she asked him to give her an authentic experience of slavehood. They blindfolded her, drove her out to the Center, and she began an experience that involved being chased through the woods at night by bloodhounds from Frostburg, sleeping in caves, and wearing chains.

Interesting questions about carrying seeds with you when you set out for freedom, about poring over 19th Century agricultural journals to find out about traditional cropping techniques, pest control, and how to keep the deer at bay (use a fence and hunt them). Cleverly, Cohen read old cookbooks to find out what people were eating. Button Farm, with Cohen's tireless - really tire.less. - cheer-leading and touting and recruiting of volunteers, and dredging and pleading for dollars and support, sleeping surrounded by heat-lamps and delicate seedlings or tobacco and squash, is now a beautiful, if fragile success.

He works at times with food historian Michael Twitty, founder of the fantastic AfroFood Ways (http://www.afrofoodways.com/).

Then we had vegan lunch on our laps sitting with everyone on the marble staircase in the sun. The Carnegie Library is a beautiful space to talk about food and freedom.

Slow Food is Good Food and the Snail is Metaphorical

Slow Food USA's logo is a snail. Good in a garlicky butter-and-parsley sizzle of course, good too as metaphor for us, of course - plump and happy, clambering through arugula and heirloom tomatoes of an evening. "Soil, water, air, and light. Simplicity," the garden says to us, "Now, That's Delicious."

Slow Food USA (www.slowfoodusa.org)is a movement, a grassroots groundswell, and, as missions go, "the revival of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community" is a mission as profound, pleasing, and optimistic as soup.

Slow Food USA and all its state affiliates (SlowFoodDC is the closest/biggest to Annandale) is an educational organization dedicated to land stewardship and ecologically sound food production. They work to establish sound food policy, healthy, affordable school lunches, encourage people to plant victory gardens, save heirloom fruit, veggies, and animals (see Orange Oxheart Tomatoes and You).

These are hardly smug and indulgent goals. The group works to feed kids and families. Slow Food USA is one of the reasons why your town has a farmers' market. It's why you know the words "sustainable" and "organic" and "community-supported agriculture."

Then, like all People-Plant-Earth revelries, there are poetic connections. The message is that Slow is Good. Slow is a crusty loaf and dewy glass, snowy cloth and chiclet-toothed friends. Under an arbor. It's history human and animal in that Norton grape, in that Amish Pie Squash. Thoughtful Food. Eat slowly, it says, talk, nod, mop that thick plate with a chewy slice.

Smell.

Slow Food says that eating is another opportunity to exercise calm in our worlds - to exercise ease, naturalness, frankness, maybe even, what's this?, Love.

Well.