We spent the morning washing out the tannins. And tannins were everywhere. Buckwheat. Avocado pits. Hemlock bark. We washed it out and processed it, and placed it in little baby food jars. When we had a dozen of them, packed in an egg case, we put it in a cardboard box addressed to the Gilbert Chemical Company. That's how you'd get the bottle of tannic acid in your chemistry sets. 

Our neighbor next door does all the sulfur bottles. The crossing guard makes the gum arabic. Mr. Berlin at the candy store works nights on the copper sulfate. Mrs. Fishbein grinds out the sodium bisulfate and her husband does the sodium bisulfite. And my friend Danny's mother's cub scout den makes the litmus paper.

In our town, Chemistry is a cottage industry. Being up in the mountains, surrounded by exploitable natural resources, it's been part of the town culture for years. There's a natural gas "spring" that we tap to run the town's bunsen burners and gaslights. The library stocks old lab reports and educational films. We even have an abandoned radon spa.

Around here, politicians don't mention superfund sites, nuclear waste dumps, Bhopal, or other chemical disasters. That's no way to get elected.