Agape

Cold like this, it's best to shed any impatience. Napped early yesterday, got up, stoked the fire, then back to bed, let the fire go out before dawn. Got up, cleaned the stove-pipe, knocked pitch from the spark-arrestor cap, an awkward job I manage by leaning out an upstairs window and poking it with a bamboo pole. Finally get a good fire going, suit-up and get outside. Bring in several arm-loads of wood first thing, frozen and so cold that it brings down the temperature in the house and creates chilly air currents. I do this first thing, so that I'll be outside, raising my body heat, while the wood comes to room temp. Supposed to be really cold, probably zero here, 10 degrees in town, so I cut and split some very dry oak beam scraps I had stashed under the house, put them in a separate pile for late-night -- early-morning fires. I cut some very dry Osage Orange (from the Wrack Show) for night sticks. Decided on chili, which I'll eat on a bed of mashed potatoes, and I've got some lamb shanks, four of them, which I put on to cook in chicken broth, early; salt and pepper, several large dry various chilies. I stir them whenever I come inside. A pot of black beans cooking on the stove too. Mid-day I have to raise both of the pots up off the stovetop because I've gotten it so hot (the oven was spiked at 600 degrees, no telling how hot it really was; I knew a guy in West Virginia that hand-made knives and he annealed them in his cookstove) for which I use those 'eyes' that hold pots on a gas range. They may have another name, I'm sure they do, but the used appliance store where I buy mine calls them 'eyes' and that's good enough for me. By 1 in the afternoon I'm done with working outside. Plan for tomorrow is to cut and stack another outside rick into the shed. Five inches of new snow, on top of a slightly compressed five inches; I sweep a path to the woodshed, a path to the outhouse. The seat for the outhouse hangs from an 'S' hook, from a beam near the stove. Thank you, Mister Buckeye. Come inside, take off the outer layers, don the bathrobe over Carhartt bibs and long underwear, a second layer of socks and over-sized fleece lined slippers. Ready to tackle the chili. Quickly shed the bathrobe, as it is really warm, standing over the stove; then the hooded sweatshirt. I might chill the pot of shanks, let the fat congeal and save it for some other project, if I was cooking this for guests, but I want fat in my diet right now, so I don't remove any (in fact, I cook the onions in bacon fat and add that too) in this process. Strip the meat from the bones, add it back to the broth, add the beans, the onions, some diced tomatoes, several chili powders. This is really good stuff. Tomorrow, it will be terrific. That's the wrong word. But at least frightening in its food value. Served on mashed potatoes. Nothing surprises me anymore.