Ephemeral Stream

Because of the camber in the driveway, trapped but fleeting freshets flow in the ruts, dropping fines in the flats. I have to walk down on the median which quickly soaks the bottom of my pants. Wet clothes hanging everywhere, and the house smells like a damp dog, so I decided to cook the squirrel that Joel had left in my mailbox (he called, thus the walk down and back) right away. There's no privacy anymore, the mail-carrier left a note for me to enjoy my dinner, that it was probably illegal to leave a squirrel in the mailbox, and how was I going to cook it? I caramelized a large yellow onion, then browned the squirrel parts (six pieces) in olive oil, added the onion and a goodly splash of white wine left over from the benefit, scraped the brown bits, put on a lid and let it simmer for an hour. Took the body parts out, thickened the gravy, de-boned the parts (pulled squirrel), mixed it back into the gravy (much black pepper) and served myself on toast. I used a healthy squeeze of #5 Unami paste in the gravy. Linda got it for me in the gourmet shop at the airport. I'm rapidly becoming the king of pastes. Being Southern, where gravy is a beverage, it's great fun to extend the limits of 'sauce', which reminded me that I needed to tend my special sauce and that because I was currently collecting weeks worth of rainwater, I had plenty for the clean-up that inevitably follows any serious work in the kitchen. I have various salsas, a great raspberry/chipotle jam, and the tail-end of several bottles of wine. Buffalo Trace is great bourbon and I pour an inch in the jelly-jar I use for casual drinking. Then set to work. I keep the sauce in two jars, in case I drop one, so there's always a mother, under a layer of congealed pig fat. The famed Sauce Confit. Break off the layer of fat and boil the sauce, clean the jars, get out the blender, caramelize another onion; before I wash anything I rinse it in left-over wine, add everything to the mix. Run it all through the blender, then reheat to boiling, then simmer for an hour, to reduce, then pour into jars topped with melted, home-made, seasoned lard, and, after cooling, stash in the fridge. Takes all afternoon, but it's a pleasant task, the way the smells and tastes intrude on the sensory self. Reading at the island (trying to make sense of myself, I haven't edited a book in over a decade) I'm struck with how I use linguistic devices, the clustering of consonants, the uncertainty of tense, a general buffoonery, to write the way I do. It's all about the spoken voice. When I write the best, it's like we're having a conversation. I have hours of silence on tape, just to show that I wasn't wasting my time. Waves of rain from the northwest. What's love got to do with it? Everything, probably, but there's no hard evidence. What is love, really, other than fleeting pain. Tom This was meant to be the third paragraph in a twenty-four hour period, one per shift, but the phone went out, and I couldn't send it. Now, instead of being the last paragraph in a sequence, it'll be the first in another. Strange, how that happens. I had every intention... but then.