Thursday, February 25, 2021.
In Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories – The Three Day Blow (a slice of life about two friends hanging out when the autumn winds come) – Nick and Bill were drinking whiskey. Both were enamored of the quality of the beverage, and as they drank, they began to discuss why it was so good. Bill tells Nick, ‘it’s the peat.’ Nick complains that ‘you can’t get peat into whiskey.’
But you can. Like grapes are to wine, barley and peat are to making whiskey. Also, the soil, temperature, climate… Hemingway, a connoisseur of all spirits, must have known this. It might be why he deemed Paris, ‘moveable.’ Maybe the city spun before his eyes.
With whiskey, peat is used as fuel to make fire that dries out the barley. It imparts a flavor. I doubt if my mom knew this – she drank slo-gin fizz when she was young and wine in her later days. Gallo Rose’ soothed some of her pain before she made her way, peacefully into the great beyond.
But she knew something. Decades before, she dealt with peat. I was there. Late 50s, maybe early 60s. Bit of a blur, now. In summer, tho’, I can tell you I wore a white crew t-shirt, blue jeans and RedBall Jet sneakers. Everyday. Along with my baseball mitt – but that’s another story.
A guy poured a half ton or so of fertilizer, ‘Guaranteed to make your lawn Heaven on Earth,’ onto our front lawn. No angels danced, no manna rained down from above. The lawn sucked just as it always did. Probably due to the shade from the overarching Elm trees, which met their doom by some Dutch tree disease throughout the 1960s. Or was it peat?
Ironically, about 5 years back, the Dutch pulled history’s most well-preserved corpse out of a peat bog. Wouldn’t it have been funny if it looked like…no, never mind!
Mom saw what happened and called the spreader back. He came – haha, silly guy. “Get this crap off my grass,” Mom told him.
“It’s fertilizer! Wait til—”
“You get it off here. It’s peat moss. It ruined my grass.”
Immediately, peat moss became a bad thing to me. Cheap, crummy lawn killer. My mom knew, and that was good enough. She may have been talked into the fertilizer, but when this peat burned her grass, she wasn’t about to be buffaloed a second time. The guy stopped arguing, scraped up his peat, and gave her cash.
Probably why I never drink whiskey. And I’m staying away from wine! Miss my mom? You bet!
