My garlic guru

Jack Deatherage, Jr.

(12/2018) "So you know the Deatherages? They're friends of yours? Well, you just hit the bottom of my list of socially acceptable people."

The DW and I would to burst into laughter at the expressions people took on when Marda made such pronouncements. To have known Marda is to have despised her, or not. We loved the rude, frumpy, cantankerous queen b (the "b" generally, but not always followed by "itch"). Mutual acquaintances couldn't understand my laughing at Marda's disparaging remarks about me when I wasn't present. What they didn't know was I'd heard worse from her while standing next to her.

"You're not in my will. I'm leaving you nothing. Can I put you down as the contact to okay the ending of my life? Just in case I'm brain dead and on life-support. Since you won't inherit, you'll have no reason to unplug me prematurely." We had that kind of relationship.

When she hired our kidlet to work her gardens she warned him, "If you don't do the job to my satisfaction I will fire you. And that will not be the end of my friendship with your parents!" (Years after she fired him, he wrote: I was actually attempting to teach the slugs to eat the weeds for me, thus allowing me to claim their efforts as my own. If that slowed them down, well, it's not my fault that their work ethic left me wanting. Damn slugs, I tried for days to teach them and they devolved into a sort of communism, arguing about the classes and suggesting that I was some sort of tyrant attempting to steal from them. I don't claim to understand what went wrong, I don't even know where they heard about Karl Marx, but they were fervent in their refusal to respond to my attempts and in the end revolted against me, resulting in my hasty dispatch.)

In spite of having fired the kidlet, Marda, a serious cook in her own right (her home's galley kitchen rivaled those of some restaurants I've been in), offered advice as needed when the younger Jack decided he wanted to become a commercial cook. That she had little good to say about this area's restaurants didn't stop her from urging the young one to seek employment in any of them to begin his education. He eventually worked in four of local restaurants, two of them still open for business. (That Marda sold herbs and spices, and grew gourmet garlic varieties, and had few restaurants as her customers may have had something to do with her disdain for local eateries. However, given the collection of international cookbooks she maintained I'd guess she really did see most of the locals as inferior.)

We first encountered Marda while visiting Willow Pond Farm outside of Fairfield twenty or so years ago. She walked us about the farm's gardens while attempting to educate us on the uses of culinary and medicinal herbs. Her sarcastic wit endeared her to me and follow-up visits to the farm were seldom a disappointment since the farm's owner was as caustic about Marda as she was about him. Listening to them berating each other over Latin names of plants was hysterically funny considering I couldn't remember, let alone pronounce any of the names they flung back and forth with mutual contempt!

During our last visit to Willow Pond, Marda informed us she and her husband Micheal, were going to open their own herb/tea shop on a tail-end of the local mountain range a few miles northeast of Fairfield. They had been experimenting with various types of garlic, and would be offering those to discerning customers as well. As I had recently begun using fresh garlic in my own cooking, and the DW was familiar with that area of Adams County, we decided to visit the shop one late June afternoon.

I don't care what any pedestrian cook thinks they know about garlic. Unless they've walked among shady trees sheltering stacked rows of freshly lifted locally grown garlic from the sun's degrading rays, they are merely kitchen babes babbling about field stones thinking they are gems. The aroma of freshly fork lifted garlic was amazing! There couldn't possibly be a level of interest beyond that!

Marda kicked that thought out of my head when she began cutting slivers of garlic from the assortment of cultivars and offered them for sniffing and tasting. None. I repeat- none of them were as harsh or bitter as the bulbs I'd been buying from the local supermarkets. I was captivated by the variations in flavors as well as the sometimes painful burn some of the cultivars caused. (Marda claimed, and later plantings of my own confirmed, that seriously cold winters produced seriously hot garlic. Once cooked, the ability to burn a tongue vanishes.)

It took me less than a year to become one of Marda's regular customers, standing in line in July with other garlic junkies, begging for an early release of any garlic to sooth the desperation building as the harvest matured. Given my fixation, how could I not plant a few cloves- okay, 110 to be exact. (Marda and Micheal planted 10,000 that same year.)

"So, you've come to spy on my garlic beds have you?"

"No Marda. Eh-hem. I, uh- I need some Tellicherry pepper corns." While she'd go in the house to fill the pepper order I'd walk about her garlic plantings taking in as much as possible- how the stalks were sizing up, the spacing between them, the height of their raised rows.

"You should have brought a camera and a notebook. We both know how poor your memory is." She'd remark when she caught me studying a particular row. "Those are blah blah blah. That variety grows like that and will eventually straighten out when the weather warms. I'll save you some seed bulbs if you'd like to try them in your flatland garden."

Micheal died after a long struggle with cancer. Marda asked me if I could bear her grief having heard I'd borne the brunt of a Gulf War vet's struggle to maintain his sanity during his deployment. I allowed I could handle it, we'd become friends enough that I couldn't refuse. It was not long after she'd recovered, as much as she ever would, that she asked me to be the one who would allow her to die should that circumstance ever arrive.

She also urged me to get hold of some ground I was certain to have access to as long as I'd need it for growing garlic commercially. She was well aware her days in the business were fading. On June 12th of this year she remarked, "I think this is the last year for garlic and the tea shop. I'm tired. When you have the ground, I'll copy all of Micheal's notes and give you his contacts at Penn State. Once you've mastered the basics of growing garlic on a commercial scale I'll help you with the hard part- the marketing."

Her gardener found her dead in her bed four days later. Another hole in our hearts.