The best gardener I ever knew — an old guy, of course, since the ones with their wits about them survive while the others get eaten by wild boars, or something — told me his six-gun theory of gardening.
“You've got six bullets in the gun. Each one represents an hour of good labor, really actually being present and thinking about it time, that you have in a day. When you look at a garden, you have to decide where those go.”
He elaborated by pointing at a row of flowers and bushes. The bushes take time to plant, need babying, and will die if you do not properly dig, flatten the sides, gently deform the root ball, fill to the right pressure (like packing with shag) and water them in. The flowers? Dig a hole, drop, and pour water on them. Some weeds you can yank and toss, others you have to dig out.
“I've got two bullets to do those bushes. Another to get that small stump out of there, some kind of yucca. It'll take only one to do the flowers. You have to know when to do a perfectionist job, and when to plant like a college student. If you don't, you won't get it done, and you'll end up rushing the whole thing and have dead plants.”
The guy should be a CEO, but he'd never put up with an office, the meetings that should have been an email, the TPS reports, HR “concerns,” water cooler snipe-bullying, and office politics that belong in elementary school (“lower school” for y'all in the South). I took his wisdom to heart in all areas of my life, which explains my tobacco cellar.
My biggest efforts go toward people. I tend to like them, even if some are as cracked and flawed as I am, and realize unlike most of our species that people take time and effort. They are living things, like plants, so you have to make sure they have what they need, and to take time to wander around and move aside lower branches, looking for root rot and dryness or that errant stone which can make a plant crick and bend. Everything else in my life is chaos.
So now we turn to the tobacco “cellar,” although it barely qualifies for that name. When I wander into the local pipe shack, I buy things that look good. Sometimes I do this impulsively, when I'm thinking over a problem or just got through a tough experience, so the little tins come marching home in droves. When there are sales, online or in store, I tend to gravitate toward old favorites and bring home a box or two. All of these go into the cellar. Bulk blends go into jars, which I keep meaning to label, and tins go wherever they fit.
The cellar represents an archaeology of how things were going. That good year when money kept appearing in old jacket pockets? I picked up quite a few pounds of Gawith Hoggarth, Mac Baren, Sutliff, and Newminster bulk blends, and packed them away in jars at battalion strength. The grim years when the world seemed to be more on fire than usual produced jars of packet blends — the packets do not really keep their seal, so I jar them if I'm not going to smoke them immediately — and a few tins that I hope they bury with me so no one smokes them, stuff I bought on sale that has since been discontinued for just cause.
As far as organization goes, I fell back on my longtime friend's advice. An excellent worker knows when to be a UCLA med student level perfectionist and when to be a slacker. This closet, attached to our guest room that also serves as an office, exercise room, storage space, and temporary greenhouse, contains lots of stuff. It's quite large, for reasons unknown, since the bedroom is not huge. Books line most of the shelves, and random Walmart and Ikea shelving units are stuffed in there, too, overflowing with old technology, gifts from grandmothers long departed, pens and inks, art projects that seemed fun until the first big hurdle, big puffy coats for winters that materialize once a decade, fishing rigs and tackle boxes, a single ski, and random pieces that fell off the house or our refrigerator. It's the miscellaneous drawer writ large, but it also contains lots of little jars and tins, with a few of those decorative tins in the back that may contain treasure but are equally likely to be filled with old socks.
In my experience, the best jars have no label. Most have something scrawled on the top, usually initials that I thought would tell me something about the contents. However, the really good stuff — usually home blends — never gets a label because at the time I was thinking, “this is so awesome I'll never forget what it is.” Then the kitchen disposal blew up or the internet went out and I slid it onto a shelf, shut off the light, closed the door, and forgot about it for some arbitrary length of time. This is the only way that I “age” blends consciously, by seizing them like squirrels grab nuts and then stashing them away, to be discovered when I really need them.
Last night was a grim time because as usual I found myself in the sad place of staring at the shiny metal bottom of a tin, having depleted the contents. One is tempted to despair in such times, but the answer is to close the tin, toss it in the recycle bin (even though our city just drops that in the landfill), and go rooting and rummaging in the cellar for something good. If a jar looks promising, usually it is good, but sometimes amazing.
Having smoked from today's jar for a few hours, I can tell that it is an old batch of my favorite home mixture (as opposed to home blend, something made from relatively raw ingredients). I like to chop up Cotton Boll Twist and Brown Twist Sliced, dice some Long Cut Perique, toss in a little bright Virginia and Cigar Leaf, and then mix it up with my greedy fingers before jarring. It makes a really tasty vaper with some strength to it, and serves as the perfect blend for the first half of a week, which is why this jar came to me now. The closet knows, and the closet bestows. It shows the ultimate duality of “smoke what you like, and like what you smoke,” which is that the second part is as important as the first. You have to embrace what life sends your way and enjoy the heck out of it because today is unique like every other day, and both out of our control and there for us to feast upon.