Dustpan Alley (OLD)

Portland
(in which I break my promise to talk only of rainbows, butterflies, and Donald Trump)

My mom spent Sunday helping me organize the custom bath center in the store. I don't know what else to call it. Maybe "witchy corner"? Here's what it is: a shelf stocked with bulk dead sea bath salts, Epsom salts, bulk tea bath herbs, jars for putting together bath salts for gifts, supplies for tea baths such as reusable muslin bags, sealable tea bags (big enough for tea baths), and essential oils that are already portioned off for use in scenting your own salts. It's a Do It Yourself beauty station.

One of my favorite places on earth is Rosemary's Garden in Sebastopol California. This little section in my store is meant to be like that store, in miniature. A place where you can get your witchy self on. Where you can make your own bath luxuries and maybe even some cosmetics eventually. Why? Because it's cheaper when you make them yourself, it's better because you can make exactly what you want, it's fresher because you're mixing the scents yourself, and potentially it's better for the environment because less packaging is needed if you bring your own containers back to fill them up- which I intend to encourage by offering a ten percent discount on any bulk item for which the customer has brought their own container.

Best of all though? It's flippin' fun!

Each little vial has approximately 20 drops of essential oils in them. Enough to scent anywhere between 2 cups of salts and 6 cups of salts (depending on how strong you like your scent). Anyone serious about making their own bath products will probably want to buy whole bottles of oils, which I will not be selling. But to dive into a project without having to commit to a whole bottle when all you need is 18 drops is very convenient.

I'm very excited about this section in my store. Is it obvious? My mom is excited about it too. And why not? She's the one who brought me up to get excited about DIY projects, herbs, and potions. One thing that we really needed was an aromatherapy book for reference in the store. So we took off for Powell's yesterday since it was raining and I couldn't work in the garden.

First we stopped off at Whole Foods right up the street. While there we ran into our old friend Clinton. I mean to say that he's been a friend for a very long time, not that he himself is old. Which is kind of immaterial anyway. Because Clinton is the kind of guy who really couldn't give a rat's ass what anyone thinks about him. Clinton was one of the two witnesses to my Vegas wedding in the Hearse. Clinton was in the casket area with his (then) girlfriend Sarah. No one had to get out of the vehicle. It was a full service drive up chapel.

After Clinton took off for home (he had just gotten off of work) I checked out the Arcana line of soaps that he's been telling me about. He's right, they are perfect for our store! A little pricey, but something I would certainly buy as a gift for someone. Super cool labels and really good scents. Plus, added bonus, they are locally made.

I don't collect novels anymore. I don't stock pile fiction. However, I do have a growing collection of reference books for cooking, gardening, crafting, and finally-for herbology and homemade beauty products. I need to apply for credit with Publisher's West so that I can get my hands on a lot more books for the store about kitchen gardening and DIY crafts. Third Street Books is a fantastic book store, and you can order almost anything that's available from them, but they don't have a large garden section and their DIY section is mainly knitting focused. So I'd like to fill in the blanks in my store with more of that stuff. Not a lot, but with books I've used and found indispensable.

I found a great medicinal herb reference book, an aromatherapy book, and two natural beauty recipe books. Exactly what I was hoping to find.

When I was nineteen, hanging out with two male science fiction nerds in San Francisco*, I read a lot of Andre Norton books. All the ones I could find from the Witch World series. You probably know that this series is really meant for a more adolescent audience...but who cares? Her books are EXACTLY the kind of fantasy/science fiction I love, lots of apothecary action, lots of middle ages imagery and magic mixed with futuristic machines and evil. How can you go wrong? Naturally, I wanted to be like all the witches in this series. Except that I didn't care about being buxom, which, judging by the book covers, they always were. I wanted to be talented in the apothecary arts (I haunted the dried herb sections of all the health food stores I knew about), to wear that great mix of medieval inspired clothes with a modern twist, and obviously I wanted to be magic.

I can't say I've ever been into fairies or dragons (although I do love the Dragons of Pern series). I am not a huge fan of historical reenactment societies (people get a little obsessed and more often that not, there's a lot of sleeping around between the members that makes for very messy relationships which I find unattractive), but always I've been attracted to the more practical application of what's so appealing about all of these old legends and practice a little of it in my life. I don't believe in the kind of magic that levitates human beings. Sorry, I will have to see it with my own eyes before I embrace that. But I do believe in quieter magic. The kind of magic you find in chemistry.

A lot of the arts people practice today seem laced with magic. I mean, how the hell did someone ever figure out how to knit? I can't even imagine what some one was doing to discover this incredible art in which you take spun fibers and make them into a flexible fabric with two sticks. WTF?! Or how about this: how the heck did people discover that olives would be good to eat if only you rinse them out for forty days with lye washes and then cure them in vinegar? HUH? I see that as a kind of magic. History must be lined with the dead who ate the wrong mushrooms, who poisoned their own bodies with the tannins from strange fruits until they found out exactly what to do with them to make them tasty and nonpoisonous.

Chemistry is magic. I'm not interested in the kind of chemistry being practiced in high profile slick top secret labs like Dupont. I'm not interested in the kind that produces synthetics. I'm also not interested in the kind practiced by pock marked, morally corrupt people making crack in their basements. That's chemistry too, and maybe even magic in a way, but I'd certainly call it EVIL. I'm interested in the simple chemistry that people have been practicing at home for a couple of thousand years.

At this point it would probably not surprise anyone to know that I love the mystery series "Cadfael". Oh yeah, monastery gardens, store houses full of drying herbs (I can't remember what the word for these are right now and it's driving me crazy!!), and making alcohol...what could be more exciting than all of that?

I may as well mention here that I don't believe that herbs can heal absolutely anything. When I get a bladder infection (thankfully it's only happened twice so far) I go to the doctor immediately. When we get strep throat we take antibiotics. I also take psych meds which have helped me live a much better quality of life. I think there are just times when modern medicine gets us to a margin of safety faster than herbs can and I'm thankful for them. I think a mix of natural medicine and modern is pretty ideal.

Well, I better be off to attend to the growing pile of clean laundry before it suffocates us. Of course, I'd rather be suffocated by clean laundry than by dirty laundry. But I'd really prefer not to be suffocated at all. Have a great Tuesday!

*We spent a lot of time at Rock-n-Bowl on Haight Street. Gregory and Jeffrey were particularly interested in why the hell I wasn't more interested in sex. Not with them, but with anyone. I think that they concluded that I was not only a prude, but also repressed sexually. I didn't point out that when you spend most of your time with two science fiction nerds who are not interested in you romantically, you don't invite a lot of dating into your life. I loved them though. I had a huge crush on Gregory for quite a while, which I'm sure amused him greatly, and then I got over it and I just loved hanging out with them as one of the "guys". Sometimes I miss them still.