Chop this post down to size

"Precis writing" was a task that I enjoyed in high school English.  I liked how we had to get to the gist of the argument, typically in about a third of the original length.  This meant that I had to understand the assigned essay, and then decide what the important ideas were and what I should discard.  If the teacher directed us to do a precis in 75 words, I would often complete it with a word count that was even lower.  Yes, we had to include a word count along with our response essay.

But, it is only writing of lesser mortals that we can prune down to size.  Most of this blog material can be read by skipping words and lines.  Heck, you can simply skip reading the blog itself!  A precis writing of a blog post here will result in a blank page!  With the best of the essays, on the other hand, there is no way to engage in precis writing.  Consider, for instance, this paragraph that I blogged about a couple of days ago.  Every word there is precious. Every single word is there for a reason.  With great masters, well, you don't mess around.

Thus, it is with care that I am reading Love in the time of cholera.  There are many words like petate that are new to me. Places and historical aspects that expose my ignorance.  And then there is "vetiver."  It was buried in a paragraph where Marquez writes about the metamorphosed heroine going shopping:

She paid no attention to the urgings of the snake charmers who offered her a syrup for eternal love, or to the pleas of the beggars lying in doorways with their running sores, or to the false Indian who tried to sell her a trained alligator. She made a long and detailed tour with no planned itinerary, stopping with no other motive than her unhurried delight in the spirit of things. She entered every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live. She relished the aroma of vetiver in the cloth in the great chests, she wrapped herself in embossed silks, she laughed at her own laughter when she saw herself in the full-length mirror in The Golden Wire disguised as a woman from Madrid, with a comb in her hair and a fan painted with flowers.

I saw that word. I smiled.

Marquez has situated the fiction in an unnamed country that has a Caribbean coast.  Most likely in Colombia.  Not far from Maracaibo, in Venezuela, where I spent three weeks almost three decades ago.  Vetiver  in the Caribbean?

Vetiver itself is a Tamil name.  I had no idea that the plant had made all the way across to the new world.  As always, Wikipedia offers details--including that Haiti is a major producer.  Haiti?

An aunt of mine always had vetiver in the water that was in the kind of a earthen clay pot that awesomely cooled water in the hot, hot, hot summer months.  I never liked the taste of vetiver-infused water, and preferred it plain the way we did at our home.

I hope vetiver has not been forgotten in the old country, even as it has found a home in the new world.