Mucilaginous Root

Yup, the marshmallow plant is a flowering herb with a mucilaginous root that is used for medicine and confections. There’s something about the word mucilaginous that just makes you want to… eat candy?

Not so much.

I’ve never been nutty crazy about marshmallows, but I’ll take ‘em rather than leave ‘em. I used to like kiddy cereals with marshmallows in them – mostly the Frankenberry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula variations, but I’ve eaten my fair share of Lucky Charms, I even remember when they first came out with the purple horseshoe marshmallow. I vaguely recall the blue diamonds being new.

Grandma used to make us peanut butter and marshmallow cream sandwiches. Shit yeah! That was like candy and lunch all together. Honestly the thought of eating one now makes my stomach clench a little, but man I loved those sandwiches.

S’mores were a definite favorite when I was a kid and we would spend those glorious holiday weekends out at Hood Canal. Somewhere around my flowering teenage years I started getting off more on watching the marshmallows burn in a nuclear flame out than I did eating them. But I remember one weekend out on the canal with just my brother, my cousin and my uncle - where we pulled more crab out of the water than was legally allowed – there were big plans for roasting that jumbo bag of marshmallows. It ended up turning into a marshmallow fight of epic proportions that had my grandparents finding fossilized candy in random nooks of their house for months to come.

And then I remember my very first Dead show. Some guy on the lawn there between sets watched the first few missile shots of a marshmallow battle fly past him. He turned to his friend, and with a grave seriousness said, “I just don’t have the energy for another marshmallow war”. I laughed for like half an hour.

Of course I was hallucinating at the time.

We’re planning on going camping this weekend, and normally it wouldn’t have entered my mind to do it, but I think we’re gonna have to invest in a bag of marshmallows for the campfire.