In Michigan, even southern Michigan where I grew up, the summer evenings reach far into the night. After a slow humid day, there is an even slower liminal period when the sun sits at the horizon, the stars carelessly shed their lights, the fireflies start to click on, as if testing their glow, and the garden beds seethe with the scents of sweet blooms and wide chlorophyled leaves.
The more so at my house because my mom was in the herb garden cutting the lavender, the basil, the verbena, and these smells comingled in the heavy air, like the oxygen-rich sweetness after a thunderstorm.
I was starting into my obdurate teenage years, but the smells of things always had a tranquilizing effect on me. I sat on the stark concrete block of a front porch on a plastic chair reading, but so distracted by the smell of the plants being cut and crushed and soil being lightly overturned that I was only taking in a few sentences per minute.
“Do you want to help me?” My mom looked up from where she had gotten to among the chives.
“No, ma. Those plants are your thing.” I thought such a response gracious, not seeing in it the invitation to share something. Besides, getting off the chair, going down into the dirt? Too much like work. And I was enjoying the result of it enough from where I was.
My mom was growing and cutting more herbs than was her wont, however. Since the beginning of the summer, she’d started her own company—although I use the word loosely considering I don’t think a single legal term was ever invoked with respect to it. She called it “Elysian Fields” and had, as its sole assets, a rubber stamp with the name and an angel, a role of blank stickers, flat plastic containers—like those strawberries come in— and a wooden cash box.
I don’t know if they had yet to regulate herbs, or what, but my mom convinced several grocery stores to stock her products and a couple of times I went with her when she changed them out. And at the store by myself, or with my friends, I went over, too, to check on her items, see if any had sold, and smell the peppery nasturtium smell of the garden in exile.
In southern Michigan, in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much of a market for fresh herbs, and my mom was lucky to sell one or two packages a week. She figured she might need to show the shoppers directly the benefits of the herbs, so it was back to meeting with the store managers, this time to ask to demo the products. I imagine they only said something like “The customers? Sure, feed ‘em whatever you want, lady.” Because the next week, we were there—I don’t know how I was drafted into helping—setting up a spidery garage card table in the produce section while my mom arranged tablecloth, bread, nasturtiums (again), and a butter which had been crammed with dill. The smell of which was so fresh, it made me feel like I was lying in a heap of the stuff in the shade. I wondered at all the shoppers who could pass by the opportunity to see what it was this curious pair was up to in their produce section. I’m sure I looked sullen enough at 13 or whatever I was and likely did not encourage interaction by my clothing and choice of facial expression, but the dill smell was so well-chosen; it permeated the entire area.
Still, most shoppers only passed through the produce section on their way to the great bounty of microwave popcorn and frozen pizza elsewhere in the store. But I was content to help myself to the samples—my mom must’ve anticipated this and brought enough—each time noting how the slightly refrigerated quality of the dill in the produce section, made the flavor stronger, more complete. When we packed up after a couple of hours, we’d probably only spoken to five or six people.
My mom did a few more of these, but I only helped that first time. At my age, atmosphere and even good food lost out—easily—to video games, or just being on the phone with my friends, not talking but watching the same thing on TV.
The other “demos” were all about the same. Only a handful of people even willing try the dill butter, despite the clear, clean smell of it. And certainly, no one turning to pick up a package or two of Elysian Fields Fresh Dill to make it themselves.
There was no formal retiring of the Elysian Fields brand. Autumn came and even the tenacious nasturtiums failed after the first touch of frost. This was, of course, expected, perhaps even anticipated in the name which conjures both eternity, but also mortality. My mom had never been planning any large-scale greenhouse productions. The rubber stamp, the roll of blank stickers, and the cash box that made up the entirety of the business beyond the ephemeral product itself, found a place in a hall closet. Perhaps the intention was to bring them back out the next year, but, by then, the excitement of turning an indifferent public onto the benefits of herbs was off, and it all stayed in the closet where, in my older and less innocent teenage years, I was bold enough to dip into the cash box when in want of a few extra bucks. By then, the cash had been sitting there for years.
I misunderstood this to be the result of indifference. And figured if the cash was going to sit there, why not use it? I couldn’t apprehend that the money, to my mom, demonstrated the collusion of the few who’d likewise valued her work, her herbs, and the ability to get fresh dill to add to their butter. The cash was a constant reminder that she was not alone in her particular vision of the world. I don’t know if she noticed that it dwindled as I robbed the inspirational till for cigarette money.
I doubt whether my mom ever expected to make much money by the venture. I’m sure she’d hoped to do a little better than she did, but she had enough sense not to force a product the people weren’t ready for; however, only a few years later, I noticed tubes of dill, chive, basil, and the other herbs my mom used to sell in the same area she’d once occupied in the produce section. She’d been something of a gentrifier of the local palate. Perhaps it was just that people didn’t want to have to touch and chop the herbs themselves. But a tube? No, even if this had been the answer, my mom couldn’t have abided it. To her, the picking, the cutting, the tactile appreciation outweighed even the pleasure of eating the herbs. She wanted people to use their hands to prepare them.
In this sense, I realize that her short-lived venture had a predictable outcome from the beginning. The same outcome preordained for anyone who should aspire to make money from what they love doing. And even though Elysian Fields was never an actual business, and my mom’s goal was more to share her appreciation than to sell it, when it was packed as product on the shelves of the grocery store, it lost the weight, the self-sustaining importance of the summer twilight, or rather it sought to bring that magic time into too profane an arena.
If nothing else, the venture made a mark on me to whom the smell of fresh dill is inferior only to the smell of refrigerated dill, and I can comfortably conflate summer twilight with supermarket produce aisles.
