Believing

I have my own stubborn faith. A mixture of awe and science. I don't buy the 'prime mover' argument, but the whole shebang started from something; we come along, 4.6 billion years later, wondering what that was. Even if it was just a very large blast in a completely empty space, it begs several questions. What I can know are little things, the way water wends downhill, the smell of lilac, the sound a deer makes moving cautiously through leaf litter. Hard to quantify. Mostly I leave the big questions behind. I just watch tadpoles becoming frogs. I was once having what could probably be called a depressive event, sitting on a stump out in my graveyard. Eating some trail mix, clearing a spot with the toe of my boot, so I could roll a smoke and put it out safely, and the fox walks up, like she's surprised to see me there. Cocks her head, in that curious way, as if to say, get over it dude. And I start thinking about a comma that needs to be a semi-colon; and the next thing you know I'm making a very good omelet with caramelized onions and mushrooms. I'm not saying that punctuation could be a cure for anything, just that it might have been for me. You have to admire the pluperfect. Then, of course, you actually have to do something, whether you want to or not. Weird, the way meaning follows. I can try to make sense, but I can't, and I when I let go of making sense, everything falls into place. Letting go isn't easy, a whole dynamic at play, but you have to let go, before any of it makes sense. Those lines in the Amazon. Busy day. Jennifer back to finish decorating, the roofing guys came (and finished by two o'clock), then the beer and wine arrived, then the food crew and food arrived. Nothing more for me to do, so I left an hour early, stopped at Kroger for a few things, and beat it on home. Lovely sunset, ribbons of pink against a pale blue sky. Going through the various Carter papers concerning the prints today. There is a ledger, that collates the information (I don't recognize the hand) and then there is a considerable pile on information on sundry scraps of paper. The backs of cards and envelopes; and someone unstapled a mimeographed set of recipes and wrote on the back of those, so I get to read recipes from the fifties. Most of them sound dreadful, but I did copy one out for cooking a brisket that sounded interesting. The only way I currently cook a brisket requires 18-20 hours of attention, slow-smoked, away from the heat, on a grill. This recipe only requires three hours, in the oven (which is 'on' when I'm home anyway), and was quirky enough to attract my attention. I love brisket, it has a great mouth-feel. I might cook one next weekend, certainly soon, as I need to use The Sauce, which is fabulous on brisket, and needs to be pasteurized besides, put to bed under fat. Sauce Confit. It's amazing right now, hot, a hint of sweet, with fruity overtones and a touch of smoke. I'm told it's one of the great sauces ever, which it should be, as I've been working on it for eight years. Great on mashed potatoes. I make a hill of the potatoes, with a depression in the middle, which I fill with the sauce; then eat around the edges until a wall collapses, then mix them together and clean up with a sop of bread. Amusing myself with dinner is only one of the reasons I live alone. Fantasy can be expensive, because you usually have to pay the other person, but I've found that if you live alone in the woods, the fox, an imagined woman, and honey, are enough. Also not having to explain why you were trying to live through a snow storm, perched under a rock. Or making opossum pate. I'll never live that down, not that I'd want to, and it was just on a dare, when I had said I could make a pate out of anything. Ronnie rose to the bait. I could, in fact, make a very good pate from acorns and shoe-leather. There's a nutrient value attached to leather, and it's great fiber. Don't dismiss me out of line.