What?

Maybe the first night above freezing this year. What woke me was a huge slide of snow/ice off the roof that hit the deck like a earthquake. Hard to sleep through that. Line from a song, " don't want nothing, haven't got it yet" which seems about right, so I get a drink, roll a smoke, and listen to some great blues. Son House, Koko, then that slack sound, Mississippi John Hurt, delta blues, lay my down pallet on the floor. I need to get to town, carry in some things. Survival is an incremental thing. You melt some snow, you cook some grits, you do a hand-wash. Covet your neighbor's thermostat. Start all over again. My base line is to keep from dying. I'm barely successful, but that's close enough. Descending chords, talk about your Mom and trains to nowhere, a dog that followed you everywhere for years, a Black Lab, who preferred the window down, so he could smell the world outside. A great dog, with a huge tongue; he tasted the world in ways we can only imagine. There was this dude, at Janitor College, a Polish guy, Braut, our all-around Mopping Champion three years running. Had a huge tongue that was nearly always hanging out of the corner of his mouth. His other great talent, besides the masterful Modified Chevron (the same stroke I still use) was his incredible ability to name the particular variety of hops in any beer, foreign, domestic, or home-brew. I made a master list of things I needed at the house, then prioritized, and decided I should make the extra trip. Freeze/thaw cycle all week and I don't want to risk a pack much over 20 pounds. So I did go to town this morning, library (the new Henning Mankell novel), liquor store, grocery, then stopped at the pub for a beer and lunch, D came in, just as I was finishing, bought me another beer. I never do two beers at lunch, even on a day off, so I stopped at Market Street and got a coffee to go for the drive home. A good thing too, because I witnessed an accident, going out of town, and stopped, to tell the cops what I had seen. There's a road, Carey's Run Road, that intersects Route 52, and a good old boy tried to slip his pick-up into a slot he didn't fit. Clearly his fault. The first responder was the local Deputy Sheriff, Brian, whom I know, to nod to, and he thanked me for staying. I stopped at the lake, to feed the despondent ducks some left-overs from the Friday opening, achieved the ridge, read for a couple of hours with my broken toe elevated, must have napped, briefly, because the light was different, decided to cook a pork dish that looked good in my imagination, a kind of stew. Usually, when I make up a dish, it's based on materials at hand, and this is no exception, it's a long way to town and the pantry is scant. I cube a two pound pork roast, dredge it in chili powder and a little flour, lots of black pepper, brown it quickly in a hot skillet with bacon fat (I've craving fat); two pounds of small potatoes, a pound of carrots, half a bag of frozen pearl onions (I'd used the other half-bag cooking some butter beans, god were they good), all of which I kind of half-cooked in a can of chicken broth. Then I dumped everything into a smallish crock pot, set it on low and intend to cook it for 12 hours. This is going to be good, I think, answering all the winter criteria. A deeply embedded splinter, from doing kindling, I can't get it with a needle, so I worry the opening and flood it with peroxide, it'll work it's way out in the next couple of days. I figure I've had several hundred serious splinters in my life. Cypress splinters are the worst, they always fester. 95% of these I remove immediately, the other 5% are the plague of anyone who works with wood. Useless fingers and fear of infection. I flood everything with alcohol, the past, a wound, everything. Sometimes it burns, sometimes I forget, the past is a bucket of ashes. Clean the fridge. You can do that.