Heide Hay - by Schmelling Hay

First off: Heide Hay is a real person, but her marriage license calls her Ann Smith. She is also called Jezebel Fairbanks on occasion (when she is being bad), Jessica Artraides in most hotel and tourist guestbooks (when we are traveling incognito), and plain old Nancy occasionally (when she is being bookish). For the purposes of this article my name is Schmelling Hay, but I have a couple of others despite that the world knows me as David Smith. 

Okay then, so the names are changed.

We change names according to our predicament because it is more interesting.  Like the Pooh Bah of Mikado, we wear lots of hats, do lots of jobs, lead lots of lives. Why not give those people living all these lives other names too? And we do this all of the time. So why Heide?

Well . . . It's complicated, and it starts with this image:

I made this, but I did not design it. 
Ho Chi Mihn (the ruler of North Vietnam during the war) 
and Rudy Vallee (a crooner of the twenties and thirties). 
 I never forget anything interesting. I remembered this. 

As I decided what Ann's pet name for the Farm life we are beginning (I always decide these things immediately), the memory of the above poster led me into thinking about Cab Calloway's hit recording Minnie the Moocher! (which Ruby Vallee had culturally co-opted). The "hay" word in the refrain led into a notion about Eva Gabor's wonderful character in the sixties television show Green Acres (Lisa), who got "allergic schmelling hay". Since, at that moment of time, I adopted Schelling Hay as my farm name (because I am certainly not an Oliver), and Ann is certainly not a Lisa, then Heide Hay made the most sense to name a woman whose husband is dragging his wife out of the comfort of the city and onto a wreck of a farm. Now you, the reader, might wonder what this all has to do "about Heide Hay".

Everything.
What something is called is important.

Heide Hay (Ann Smith) is a very good cook, and enjoys baking more than most people. She uses baking as therapy and entertainment. Her days off from her other life as a phlebotomist (laboratory blood sucker) are often spent looking at recipes, or making something new and interesting to eat. She loves food and it is all I can do to keep from ballooning up to three hundred pounds.

When we conceived the Farm Project, one of the things we thought would be key to our eventual happiness was food preparation, as well as food production, and this opened up an entirely new need for knowing how to do food. Preserving food was something Ann Smith had little use for.  Heide Hay needs to know about preservation and she is learning how (and having a great time doing it). Making pies was never something Ann Smith did much of  because she never liked making pie crust. Now Heide Hay is perfecting making great crust because otherwise we would have a bakery instead of a pie shop on the Farm. The Farm project ought to keep both Heide Hay and Ann Smith busy learning new things and exploring old recipes for many years. And this is really what she wants to do.


You should look forward to eventually finding out what she has learned. I am sure it will be worth the short drive out to Creekside Farm, if only for the food.