Another Reception

I hadn't realized a note penciled in on the calendar was such a big deal, but there's a group in most of the day, decorating and setting up for a party of some kind. Another fancy beer and candy party. You see all kinds, so this one doesn't surprise me, but the combination of light beer and jelly beans, funny hats and kazoos set just so at every place there was a chair, actually turns my stomach. What people do for entertainment. Because I have a vivid imagination, it's not impossible for me to imagine myself wearing a cone-shaped foil hat, blowing a kazoo, but it does stretch the limits. I don't dance, but I lived with dancers for years, and in my experience, they were odd about their bodies and always counted time. I'm odd about enough things that I can identify with that. What might be important. The moon is far away, therefor smaller, but I have this bag of Brussels Sprouts that Janis's husband brought by. They'd gotten so expensive, recently, that I hadn't bought any, but suddenly I had a large bag of them. Two dishes I had in mind right away, I don't remember where they came from: hearts cut in half, braised in butter; and an odd dish I do where you break the hearts apart, and serve the baby cabbage leaves on pasta. Tuscany. White beans and kale. I have to go. Remember whatever it was. Got back to sleep, then up early enough to get to the museum in time to wash my hair and shave. D arrives, and after the monster breakfast burrito, he starts eliminating Girl Scout stuff and we install a scaled back version that actually looks pretty good. I'm able to run some errands and still leave at four. The new Jim Harrison at the library, which means tomorrow will be a sofa day. Supposed to be warm tomorrow, so maybe I can get enough wood split for next weekend as I ask TR and Megan (I don't know she spells it) out for an early dinner. An excuse to cook. A nice large sirloin steak remaindered at Kroger that I'm marinating overnight and will grill tomorrow for two days of meat and potatoes (and Brussels Sprouts) meals. Back on the ridge well before dark and the red maples are budding out in full force. The other side of the hollow is crimson in the late afternoon sun. The poplar buds are ready to explode. The chestnut oaks have a complete set of back-up buds, which is a great survival characteristic, and why the oaks have been around so long. For a couple of glaciations, they've retreated south, then swept back north. I had to go back outside and run off a couple of crows that were driving me crazy. Sometimes I love their raucous squawk but other times it gets to me. Mad Tom's Castle, I can run off the goddamn birds if I want to. I'm roasting a batch of the sprouts right now, halved, rolled gently in olive oil that I'd infused with onion and garlic. It smells good, if you like that slightly sulfurous smell of the cabbage family. We ate a lot of cabbage and potatoes when I was a kid, and after just a decade of denial, I went right back to them; the decade of denial was spent eating scavenged shellfish with watercress salads and wild asparagus. I still like all of those things, and the list grows into a life-style. First thing you know, you're dressing the twins in matching outfits. Swamp Camo. I'm not sure what I meant by that, I was thinking about several things at the same time: the orientation of my house, what I needed to add to the sauce, whether or not I'd see the Northern Lights, and exactly how deep into this Girl Scout shit have we waded? They put out all of the candy downstairs and I find I like the Skittles so I invent reasons to walk by the bowl. At one point I have to apologize to TR and D, because I'm spitting Skittle fragments in some tirade about how value is attached to art.