When I was 16 I was into poetry and wax-resistant dying and my best friend Ellen, with whom I examined cosmology, world philosophy, and gossip.

One of our conclusions then – a private catch-phrase between us – was a modification of the saying “variety is the spice of life.” We subbed “vice” for “variety.” It was VITSOL to us.

The autumn of 1966, I wrote a ditty to that theme. Then I sloppily scrawled it in paraffin/beeswax on two pieces of cotton, slapped on cold water dye, ironed out most of the wax, and presented the tapestry “To Ellen,” for her November birthday.

She treasured it. In fact, she kept it so well that in 1992, when Katie finished her 16^th year, Ellen sent the hanging as a birthday present to her.

And when Katie left home a year later, she abandoned the poem. It remained on the wall of her sunporch bedroom.

Soon after, I moved my study into the sunporch. And there it was, back with me: my old verse.

So when I left that house and moved here, of course it came along. It’s tacked on the wall in this small office/shed, between the bookshelves and the two-drawer file cabinet, above the vacuum cleaner.

Here it is, come full circle and readable but not correct. Long ago we concluded that neither variety nor vice make the spice of life. Stress does.

Good heart, good health, good food is fine,
Variety is nice
But be it known beyond all else
The Spice of Life is Vice

For nothing tops a lusty vice
With honor well-intend’d
And naught can rust the happy trap
Of souls that won’t be mended.

(Oh! for a muddy velvet-hole
to sink our sinful dreams in …
To lie in depths of foul deeds
as Satan hap’ly beams in)

My love let’s dare and do or die.
And then let’s do it twice.
I mean to live the fullest (and)
The Spice of Life is Vice.