Loose Ends

Whipping those loose boards into order. The way it starts, you either find a couple of boards, or someone gives you a special board, burly maple, or a stick of walnut with character, and you stand it up in the corner, where you're sure to notice it; it's a lovely thing, but you don't have an immediate use for it. If you're Kim you carve it into a few spoons. Since I know Kim, I don't have to actually make the spoons, he takes care of that. I saw a board, once, being used as a gate closure, rife with rusty nails. I rebuilt a 100 feet of fence and gifted a fellow rancher with a new gate so I could have that board. It was just a piece of Lodge-Pole Pine, but it had been struck by lightning and it had a black burn mark (where do you put the hyphen?) running through the grain. I had to have it. I've been struck by lightning twice, so I have a soft spot in my heart for lightning strikes, and I knew right away that I wanted this particular stick (a particular board, in carpenter talk, is always a stick) to be the headboard of a bed. The bed is lost in history, we can trace it to 1987, when it seems to be lost in a fire, comma, then the next thing. I have to say that I warned you. You knew that I'd eventually get, what, possessive? Me? Come on, really? I built a bed as God intended, a magnificent bed, on which to act out my follies. I admit to those. Even still. The fact that I wake in the morning, new light breaking over the ridgetop, is a wonder to me. Snow on the ground, and it's bloody cold. Puttered today but D was down in his back and my feet hurt. Then had to carry in a heavy pack and the canvas tote. Yesterday we hit the ground running. I hauled debris and garbage all morning while D primed the new front wall in the main gallery. After lunch he stained cherry cherry and I pack two etchings for shipment. Left work a little early, got home and both the electricity and the phone were out, almost turned around and went back to the museum, but I lit a couple of oil lamps and a couple of candles. Baked a potato right in the firebox of the cookstove. I had collected several little containers of sour cream that D had left on his plate at various pub lunches. This has become a ritual. Build a fire, of course, change into mufti, get a drink, roll a couple of smokes (a couple, because I always roll one to set next to the phone, in case there's a call, which there usually isn't, so it's usually the last cigaret I smoke at night), get the butter out of the fridge, line up the little containers of sour cream, wash the potato and prick it with a fork. Wrap it in several layers of foil. I have several implements I use for managing fires, and I use one of them to push the coals toward the back of the firebox, creating a potato sized oven space. I use my longest tongs to spin it a few times. I put a plate on the warming shelf above the stove, I want it hot. Sometimes I unwrap the potato and let it dry out just a bit, I like the toughened skin that creates, but not doing it is fine, depending on your level of preoccupation. Sometimes you end up with a lump pf coal. But if it works out correctly, and if I'm not distracted, I transfer the potato to the heated plate, cut it into a one-inch dice with a knife and fork, then squash it with the fork, butter it liberally, then a layer of sour cream, plenty of fresh ground black pepper on top and you're ready to go. I might as well be Irish. Or Basque. Or Hungarian for that matter. But I did get in a box of salted cod and I'm making some very fine cakes. I make a small dish if tartar sauce whenever I make these: a heaping teaspoon of Hellman's Mayonnaise, a level teaspoon of sweet relish, and a dash of hot sauce from my arsenal of hot sauces. I have hot sauces that I use to heat up other hot sauces; any given time, I might have ten or fifteen varieties kicking around. There's a statute of limitations on this, right?