Some Brief Remarks About Mud
When you mix earth and water in the right proportions,
you get mud. I say "the right proportions" because if there
is too little water, you end up with damp earth and with too little
earth you just have dirty water. So it's not as straightforward as
you might think.
Mud tends to have a bad reputation, but it actually can be useful.
When mixed with straw and dried into bricks under strong southwestern
sun, you get adobe, which is an excellent building material. Spas
often use mud for facials or body packs, although they are quite picky
about the soils involved and may require pure spring water to be used
as the hydration agent. Some naturally occurring mud pools attract
people either for the luxury and joy of bathing in warm sulfurous
muck or as a folk cure for rheumatism.
Usually, though, mud just makes things dirty. Children seem to have
a fondness for the stuff, especially when dressed for formal or semi-formal
outings. Freshly washed automobiles seem to attract mud. Oddly, while
children dressed in white clothes exhibit the most obvious and unsightly
stains from mud, white automobiles don't show the dirt quite so much
as do more darkly colored ones. No one seems to know why this is.
Mud is also useful as metaphor. "Mud Pie," for example,
is a rich chocolate dessert that is, of course, not literally made
of mud. (Note, however, that this term is also used to refer to the
rather messy objects that children at play sometimes produce. These
"mud pies" are, in fact, made of mud - real mud -
usually while the charming little pastry chefs are wearing white.)
Extremely strong coffee may be referred to as "mud." Politicians
are known to sling "mud" at each other - in other words,
explicit or implied calumnies. One may have one's reputation "muddied"
by the false or even true accusations of gossips. Poorly thought out
or convoluted explanations are said to be "as clear as mud."
Real mud has the advantage of being easy to clean up, provided the
scale of the soiling is not too vast. Mudslides that bury entire villages
are obviously not quickly dealt with, but on a more domestic scale,
mud's dirtying effects are simply undone. You launder clothes and
bathe children. If your car is muddied from a drive along an unpaved
rural road, you wash it to restore its shine.
There's the pity. I do not love my car, but I know how to clean it.
I don't know what to do with Ruth.