Fixed Agenda

The next few days should be a real test. I might have to stay at the museum for a couple of nights, just because I'll be the only staff person there. Mark and Charlotte are off to DC and Pegi is doing her Xmas thing on the main stage at the University. I can do this, with my MFA in logistics: first one thing, then another. Once you get into the swing of things it becomes fairly obvious. One thing follows another in a deliberate way, a desire path, and you end up with an actual path leading where you want to go. Trampled leaves and snow. Access is a relative term. Nothing is what it seems. I'm back on the ridge. Stayed the extra night in town, so that the hospital crew could pick up their tables and decorations, and, of course, they didn't show. I knew they wouldn't, despite Jennifer's promise that they would. I seem to have left a paragraph unsent (Brittle), so it's out of order, but I'll send it along anyway. The 'next few days' were a test, three days alone at the museum, but I managed to read several more essays on Andrew Wyeth. It's interesting to note that, like Carter, he thought of his work as being abstract. The walk in, this afternoon, was very cool. The fox was coming down the driveway, and when she saw or heard me, she turned right around and pranced back up the way she had come. Led me, at a distance of about fifty feet, right to my back door. She waited around until I rolled her an apple. Her coat is lovely now, filled in and fluffed out for winter, and she twitches her ass in a way that I find most becoming. As soon as I got the stove hot enough (450-500 degrees) I made a small pone of cornbread and ate nearly the whole thing. For a six-inch cast iron skillet, a cup of corn meal is just right, an egg, baking powder and soda, enough buttermilk to make it flow, preheat the skillet, with a dollop of bacon fat, until it's very hot, and bake it for twenty minutes; with these new/old artisinal whole-corn meals, with a liberal application of butter, it's one of the great things ever. My younger daughter, in the foot-steps of her grandfather, enjoys it in a mug, crumbled, with sweet milk. Dad will be 94 next month, and Mom 89, but they can't see, and struggle getting to the bathroom. My sister thinks they'll outlast us both. And she's probably right. I have no desire to out-live my usefulness.