Hard Put

Exhausted, I sleep a few hours early, then get up to eat again, and stoke the fire. The same thing, really. I was burning body fat I didn't have, so I'm eating an extra meal, now, later in the evening. Something based on mashed potatoes or acorn meal, a few pancakes with an egg over easy, three crab cakes, a protein shake with a banana, a cold can of pork and beans right from the can. This isn't a pretty meal, or even anything I'd describe at length. Tonight I killed off the pate, with enough cheese and crackers to slow a horse. I'm eating a lot right now, 3 or 4 thousand calories a day, as I've said about living in Telluride, eating until I get tired of chewing. And it's still not quite enough. Fighting the cold, climbing the hill, requires energy, and something must be burned. I'm hitting my stride, walking up the driveway this afternoon, with a light pack, thinking life was easy, this is all you have to carry. I'm stronger now, than I was a month ago; and I love this feeling, that I get every year, that I can do this, live this way. That my body acclimates. I know what to do, and I know how to do it, and I'm careful. I can't afford damage now and you should see how careful I am, walking down with my mop-handle, my crampons. Someone tried to drive up the driveway today, the evidence is clear, they hit the first stump and slid into the ditch. I just read sign, a simple pilgrim, looks like something happened. Finally got back to sleep just before dawn. When I got up for good, I called Pegi at the museum, begged a personal day, desperately needing to clean house, wash a few things. Must have burned a cord of wood in the first three weeks of the year, and that makes a mess. The cold weather, then that ill-timed function, then getting the show wrapped and delivered, I let everything else slide. Spend the morning vacuuming corners, get outside and split some wood before the afternoon rains. Clean out the fridge, heat water, do dishes; heat more water toward cleaning myself, by mid-afternoon I feel considerably more human, less a pariah. Jumping tenses, a product of leaving the computer on and joking notes throughout the day. Remembered things are often past. Right now I'm making grits, slowly, and stop to remember something, I forget what, get up and stir the grits, remember what it was. Rolling out of Columbus, the form of that landscape, glacial sediment in rolling piles. Kame. An hour long discussion of Darwin on the radio and not a single mention of Alfred Wallace. I can't believe it. Cheese grits and biscuits on a gray rainy afternoon are fine things. For 4 servings, grate in half a pound of sharp cheddar, add a couple of tablespoons of butter, a dozen grinds of black pepper. Usually plop a shirred egg on top. I do these in a funny little cast iron skillet that I think are sold as novelties, mine holds just a single large egg, is well seasoned, requiring just a dab of bacon fat to do a perfect egg. I find I can control the consistency of the yolk better this way than frying. If the oven is too hot, I do them on the corner of the stove top with a few drops of sherry and a cute little Pyrex lid that must have been with a dish, at one time, that was also a joke. Or maybe not, I don't know a lot about the history of dishes. Well, that's not quite true. It could have been the lid for a ramekin. Do ramekins have lids? At any rate it fits the little skillet quite well, and I can watch, which is critical, if you're after the perfect egg. John Thorne has an excellent essay on toast in "Mouth Wide Open", a book I strongly recommend. Rain coming in from the wrong direction, which explains why it's rain. I put out my buckets, amazed at how primitively my water collection system has devolved. When I finally get a roof on the back porch, remember that February is my first month of not paying child support, the entire water collection system will be upgraded. The problem, in this zone of ice and snow, is gutters. They rip away, under shear weight, when ice or snow releases from the enameled metal roof. I know I can build a 12 foot section of gutter, the width of the porch, that would be almost indestructible, and it would gather water from 300 square feet of roof, which is enough for my needs. I don't know the algorithm and couldn't do the math anyway, 300 square inches of roof, 40 inches of rain a year, and I'd be able to harvest the rainwater without getting wet. This a nod toward aging. As required, I could eventually rig this with a set of pulleys, so that I never actually had to lift the bucket; lower it onto a dolly and wheel it inside. The Cadillac of water collection systems. The wind is confused, and the direction of rain swings around. It's somber out, and gray. My sister wonders why I live this way, there's nothing I can say. Just because.