Moonshine

Marilyn and I owned 120 acres in Mississippi for ten years, the 1980's, and thrived. A completely self-sufficient decade except for flour and sugar. Our cash crops were cheese, home-brew, and medicinal herbs. Basic 84 hour work week, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week; milking goats, which, being the deep south, we could stagger the lactations and milk year around. Over the years, I found the remains of three stills on the property, one at the sweet spring (where I built a crude catchment from which I must have hauled four or five thousand gallons of water) and at two of the ponds where other springs had found a basin. I was reading Willie Morris today: " Mississippi was a dry state, one of the last in America, but its dryness was merely academic, a gesture to the preachers and the churches. My father would say that the only difference between Mississippi and its neighbor Tennessee, which was wet, was that in Tennessee a man couldn't buy liquor on Sunday". I printed something of his, for Square Books in Oxford (one of the great independent book stores) but missed meeting him because it was goat-birthing season. Moonshine was still common when we were there, but only the best had survived. I bought stuff, for 20 dollars a gallon, that had aged a for a year on a few Muscadine Grapes (the grape skins actually do absorb impurities from the alcohol) that I quite liked with a splash of bitters on ice. The temps are steady dropping, there's a sound, as things lock into place, winter with a vengeance. I go out to pee, what, four in the morning, in my bathrobe with an LED headlamp and I end up hauling a couple of red maple rounds into the woodshed. Hey, I'm already awake, might as well make use of my time. "On a summer evening some years ago, two of the South's most celebrated writers, William Faulkner and Katherine Ann Porter, were dining together at a plush restaurant in Paris. Everything had been laid out to perfection: a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine Burgundy emptied, and thimble-sized glasses of an expensive liqueur drained. The maitre d' and an entourage of waiters hovered close by, ready to satisfy any final whim. "Back home the butter beans are in," said Faulkner, peering into the distance, "the speckled ones." Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space. "Blackberries," she said wistfully." I lifted that completely from a book of Southern quotes, "On the Night the Hogs Ate Willie" which had me rolling on the floor. One of my great failures was not recording colloquialisms when I lived in Ms, but we were so goddamn busy. I only spent as much time writing in a week, then, as I now spend in a day, less than that. B came over for a quick drink, to make sure I was alive, and to see that I was stocked against the impending cold. Ten degrees tonight, five tomorrow night, a high in the teens. I have to get to town tomorrow, a meeting; and I want some red meat, a small steak, with a double helping of mashed potatoes, dripping in butter, speckled with an even coating of fresh-ground black pepper, and an avocado, sprinkled with lime juice. If the driveway freezes solid, and there is no snow, I should be able to drive in. I need liquids, and books I haven't read before.