The buckwheat story
In November 2001 I was frantically doing on-line research on Slovenia. I knew damn near nothing about it, and I had just a few days to decide whether to take this out-of-nowhere job offer or to renew my contract in Argentina. Thank god for the internet. Despite being tiny as far as countries go, there was no real shortage of information about the place and it wasn’t too difficult to decide to come here. One of the sites I looked at was titled SLOVENE FOR TRAVELERS and it’s not a bad little digest of language basics. Included there are the lyrics of a few traditional songs and they have contextual set-ups. Here’s one that stuck in my mind:
“All over Carinthia and Carniola the buckwheat is ready to be harvested. A maiden has been cutting it for three days. She is tired, her hands are blistered. After she has reaped three and a half sheaves her beloved comes to carry the sheaves home.”
Now, I have always loved the idea of buckwheat. I like the sound of the word buckwheat. There is something crisp, businesslike and no-nonsense-sounding about the word. In my mind, buckwheat pancakes must be more delicious than ordinary, non-buckwheat pancakes. Why settle for regular wheat when you can have buckwheat? The idea of maidens reaping sheaves of buckwheat gave an immediate and irresistible allure to Carinthia and Carniola.
As it turns out, buckwheat is not even a variety of wheat any more than ginger ale is a kind of ale. It also turns out that buckwheat, ajda, thrives in Slovenia and is a common cereal used in making porridge, pasta, dumplings and such things. Just a few kilometers up the valley from where I work is a town called Ajdovščina. That difficult cluster of consonants near the end of the word is a typical charming feature of Slovene; the šč combination is pronounced like the middle bit of ‘fresh cheese’. When you see these two letters together it’s a safe bet the word means ‘place of…’ so the name of this town is roughly equivalent to ‘Buckwheatville.’[*] I haven’t noticed any buckwheat growing there, but then again I am no expert, and I suppose I could walk through vast plains of buckwheat without ever knowing it.
One Saturday about two years ago I was walking around in the outdoor farmer’s market in Ljubljana when I saw a booth selling buckwheat pillows. That is, the pillows were filled with the husks of threshed buckwheat. (Now there are two words that sound good together: threshed buckwheat. Just seeing those two words together makes me think of my friend Matt and how fond he is of the combination crotchless chaps, and how little bothered he is by the fact that the collocation is a tautology).
So these pillows were packed with threshed buckwheat. Well, I had to get involved in that. I ended up buying the largest buckwheat pillow the woman had, which is about a third the size of a regular feather pillow and much heavier. It feels like a big beanbag and weighs about 5 kilos. It provides VERY firm support for your neck, and there is something spartan, orthopedic, and pastoral about it. This kind of small, heavy, dense pillow is not uncommon in Japan, but I think they use rice husks there[**], not surprisingly. I brought the buckwheat pillow home and felt like I’d accomplished something. Though it’s not the most comfortable sleep aid in the world, using it makes you feel like it must be making you a better person somehow, like flossing til your gums bleed.
When Magda first saw, or more importantly handled, the buckwheat pillow, she was derisive. “What is this?” she wanted to know.
“It’s a buckwheat pillow,” I replied, perhaps a little bit defensively.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” The buckwheat pillow was utterly dismissed.
Ironically, Magda ended up a huge, erm, supporter of the buckwheat pillow when she became pregnant. In the last year we have amassed a huge store of pillows of every conceivable size, shape, density, and filling material. If you are now or are planning to become pregnant, I recommend that you do the same. The pillows are useful for propping up various parts of the pregant body, and then for breastfeeding and dandling support etc they are also a necessity.
But she wasn’t pregant yet and in the meantime Magda decided that buckwheat pillow could be a placeholder for anything nonsensical. Her phrase of choice became X makes more/less/about as much sense as a buckwheat pillow. She soon was dispensing with the simile and moved on to metaphor: flying into Zagreb would be a buckwheat pillow, eg. Then the noun dropped away entirely, and so in our little personal lexicon buckwheat has come to be shorthand for something that defies logic, understanding, common sense, but in a certain endearing way.
That is why we have been known to use this word to describe Adam, sometimes even to his face, if he has been keening for more than 45 minutes for no apparent reason and with no end in sight.
You are a buckwheat baby.
* A kind reader has corrected this mistake. I’ve left the original post as it was written, but the correction is at least as interesting as my misapprehension. Check the comments to see the correct etymology of Ajdovščina.
** Wrong again. Japanese pillows also use buckwheat husks, according to a commenter. I can’t get anything right in this post.
