Good Planning

That deep muffled sound, and I'm up before dawn to have a look, flip on the porch light and am blinded, four inches and snowing hard. Crawl back under the covers. Get up for good an hour later, build a fire, make a double espresso. I need to dump my ash bucket, which I prefer to do on top of snow. Otherwise I bury them in the damp compost pile, being very careful about fires. Two more inches of snow but the temps look to go above freezing, heavy stuff now, and I'm sure to lose power, which I do, but only for a couple of hours. Spend a couple of hours outside, cutting starter sticks, splitting a few knots to burn during the day. There's a two or three inch stack of snow on every branch, the driveway is drooped shut, you can't see fifty feet into the woods, then it all starts falling, and as the branches release their load and snap back, they knock the load off other branches. It's comic and a bit noisy for a day that had been very quiet, so that when the power came on, I let the fridge cycle through one time and killed the breaker. When you have a chance for silence, it's usually best to go for it. Silence, of course, is relative. There is a sound, even, to snowfall, and the stove is ticking, as the fire changes, and then, too, there is the noise I make, stirring around, the occasional turning of a page, the pouring of a drink: sometimes I say things out loud. But alone on the ridge, I usually operate in the low single digits of dbs. I avoid noise like the plague, that's not quite true, I love natural sound, but I hate loud noise for no reason. Usually. Michael could make me believe anything, music sub-circuits normal thought. Music can sub-circuit because it cuts to the heart, when I listen to the blues, I get sentimental. Not like I have any control. This sounds like what I feel. Power out again, but I was in a saving mode, expecting the failure. Still out this morning, so I start a fire, suit up, head out to the woodshed. Leaden sky, light flurries. Several of the large rounds of Oak and Red Maple are maddeningly of twisted grain and I can't bust them with the maul, even the wedge tapers to quickly to get a purchase. I go inside to think about it, and the power is back on, so I make a double espresso and roll a smoke. I have an old Estwing hatchet that's sharp and fairly thin, I take it outside, with a short-handled 2 pound maul and a foam pad to kneel on, works great, I can follow the tiny heart checks. Not nearly as exhausting as full-swinging an 8 pound maul, I work at it most of the day, almost giddy with accomplishment. I stop mid-afternoon, because I need to shave and clean up a bit, even though I intend to do the same thing tomorrow, and get just as dirty all over again. I need to get another batch of billets under the shed, do a week's worth of kindling and starter sticks, then cook for the short week ahead. Thinking about that, while splitting, decided to do a variation on a Portuguese dish I remember from Cape Cod, 'Porko Um Pa' (something like that), cubed and marinated pork cubed (I had a third of a loin in the freezer I needed to rotate out), with chickpeas, onions and garlic, stewed in chicken broth. I have no idea what the actual recipe for this is, and no intention of looking it up. What fun's that? If it fails, I'll turn it into an odd chili. A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers today and I remember the scene from all the winters here. Snow in the trees, the trunks are black ice, and suddenly a flash of red, in this case 2 flashes, and you stop whatever you're doing and watch. The nearest is pecking through the ice on his favorite hickory, I actually recognize this particular bird, his tail is a little weird, and his knocking is enough to dislodge a rain of snow from above. He's hit with a goodly amount, an inch on his head, and he's absolutely still for a scant moment, then violently shakes, and goes about his business. "To live close with the realities of life and death demands a perspective that relegates human irritabilities to their proper place." Billy Wright. An atavistic day, I wish I could have eaten marrow bones for dinner, but I quite enjoyed another breakfast. I'd cut one small steak off the loin already. I'd weighted this down, with a rock, in a bowl of salted water, in the fridge, overnight, patted it dry, fried in bacon fat on medium heat, I don't want to sear it quickly, because it toughens; pushed the steak aside and browned some flour in the drippings, added a pat of butter and a splash of balsamic vinegar, several grinds of pepper, needed more liquid, so, the remains of the last bottle of wine, pushed the meat back to the middle, spooned over the gravy, pulled the pan over to a cooler part of the stove, put on a lid. Toasted a large slice from the middle of a sour-dough loaf that had never seen a pan, another prolate spheroid, a football-shaped loaf, and this was the middle slice. I'm a sucker for trenchers, they absorb everything, and I feel that I'm gaining knowledge when I taste what dripped. I fry a jumbo egg in butter. Now you assemble the dinner, you put the trencher on a plate, because you have to clean up afterward, plates are good, put on the steak, spoon over gravy, drape over the egg, then another layer of gravy, if there's any left. You clean all of this up with the trencher. It's just a cultural thing, think, the way we feel guilt.

I DIDN' T THINK., I was merely cleaning up.