Apricots And Lavender

I was just enjoying three plump sweet fresh apricots for dessert when I noticed a rogue fruit fly zooming in on me.  I am not about to share my apricots with a fruit fly.  Mean-spirited perhaps but those things track filth and disease and really I don't know how it found its way into my little apartment but the window is open.  As I do every summer I have been keeping all food scraps in a tightly sealed container in the fridge.  I also have a lovely fruit bowl full of lavender which I have been incrementally harvesting and drying in my apartment this summer.  It drives off bugs and flies and my bananas, apple, and ripening apricots and avocados have remained unmolested since I enacted this regimen. 

Wondering what to do about the rogue fruit fly I recalled the loose lavender flowers in my shirt pocket (I harvested several stalks today from the lavender beds on the City Hall grounds).  I sprinkled some of the lavender flowers over the apricots and suddenly, no fruit fly.  I also discovered something else: that apricots and lavender are made for each other.  I cannot describe the flavour of the two combined but even the thought of having them together makes me feel, shall we say, aristocratic.

Now I have just enjoyed semi-sweet chocolate chips sprinkled with lavender.  The purpose is of course to scare off fruit flies (which like chocolate) and it works.  It also has an interesting and subtle effect on the flavour of the chocolate, somehow softening it.  I'm not sure what I think of it yet but I'm more interested in keeping fruit flies away even if only one has strayed in through my open window.

I just asked Uncle Google and he says that fruit flies are indeed a health hazard carrying all kinds of nasty diseases.  He also told me that lavender is great for repelling them.  So, it turns out, is rosemary.  For a few years until recently I would mindlessly harvest from public plantings of rosemary as well as lavender.  This began just following our public outbreak of bedbugs in Vancouver.  I always kept rosemary and lavender in my fruit bowl and in jars.  I have never had bedbugs (knock on wood.)

How do I know all this, since I already have been doing this without first asking Uncle Google.  I don't know.  I do recall that I have long loved, revered and researched herbs for both culinary and medicinal uses.  Likely had I lived in Europe any time before the eighteenth century I would have been hanged or burned as a witch.  I somehow stumbled across herbs.  Many years ago as though in another life I moved into a rundown farm house in Richmond with an overgrown herb garden that I tried to rehabilitate.  I was given some books on herbs by a friend and thus my education began.  I discovered catnip and lemon balm, comfrey with its purple flowers and borage with sky blue flowers, fox glove and many others.  There was no lavender or rosemary growing there but I bought a thyme plant and some basil.  The thyme plant was especially soothing to me.  As well as using it in many of my culinary dishes I would often pick a sprig, rub it between my thumb and fingers and blissfully inhale its blissful soothing fragrance.  It was a balm to me.

This reminds me of once when I discovered basil growing wild in a marsh by the Fraser River on the south shore of Lulu Island, the main island of Richmond where I lived for many years.  I have no idea how it got there.  I harvested some of it and it was lovely.  I remember one of the many pointless and potentially vicious and nowhere arguments I used to have with one of my housemates.  She was one of these perfectionist Christian saints who are absolutely impossible to live with or even be friends with (I write this, understanding with a little too much regret, how much this has been said of me!)  She argued that vegetables that had been properly and organically grown would have so much flavour that they wouldn't need herbs to enhance their flavour.  This woman was a particularly untalented cook by the way and almost anything that she produced over a stove was going to be so insipid as to be almost remarkable.  Knowing how much her inferiority complex was fueling her argument, as always, I opted to shut up and change the subject and not bore or inflame her about how the most ripe and exquisitely ripe heirloom tomatoes are rendered yet more exquisite with a little fresh or dried basil.  She would likely warble, "Oh, that's yuppie!"

When my mother was dying from cancer and I was caring for her I would often escape to the physic garden of the UBC Botanical Garden.  It is a circle with a labyrinthine form and full of healing herbs.  I especially recall one summer afternoon sitting there surrounded by the healing and soothing fragrances and essences and listening with a little disturbance to the sonorous croaking of a raven flying overhead.

One of my favourite herbs will always be lemon balm.  I first discovered it growing in the herb garden in the back garden behind the farm house in Richmond.  One day my mother, freshly recovered from her first bouts of radiation therapy, decided to weed the garden for me as she celebrated her renewed energy.  That was the end of the lemon balm. 

Three years later, shortly after my mother's death, I rediscovered the lemon balm.  It was growing in a small garden bordering the sidewalk next to an old apartment building in the West End.  I picked three leaves, rubbed them and smelled them, then the words to a new song came to me:

Walk like you're ruled by God
And you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He is our heart's desire.  He is the Consuming Fire.

Walk like you're ruled by God
And you shall walk as one who rules the world.

His sceptre the rod of peace.  His Kingdom will never cease.

Walk like you're ruled by God
And you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He washes his servants' feet.  Our master and servant complete.

Walk like you're ruled by God.
And you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He poured out his blood for you and me,
Setting us at liberty.

Walk like you're ruled by God
And you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He bids us to walk in the light,
Our lamps burning in the night.

Walk like you're ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
Walk like you're ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
Walk like you'/re ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;

And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;

Walk like you're ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
Walk like you're ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
Walk like you're ruled by God,
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;

And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;
And you shall walk as one who rules the world;

So shall you walk.

Lemon balm, as many know, is a member of the mint family and the leaves exude a lovely fragrance of lemon.  It is good in fruit salads and as a herbal tea.  Sometimes when I am walking and I encounter one of the many patches of lemon balm that proliferate in this city, I will pick a leaf, smell it and softly sing this song while continuing my walk.  Where I finish singing I drop the leaf, praying for a blessing for whomever passes by the crushed leaf.