Backing Off

Powdered milk, soured with lime juice, makes an acceptable corn pone. The less you expect of things, the easier it is to get by. What brought that to mind, coming back in, yesterday, with a pretty good load of supplies, I had to stop on Mackletree for a convocation. This last late snow was havoc on the standing dead, the ground was rotten, the roots were rotten, and dead trees fall. The county has two crews clearing debris, country boys with big chainsaws, and a phone company truck was waiting to repair the line. I had to stop, because of the logs on the road, but one of the road crew indicated it would just be a few minutes, so I chatted with the phone guy, who said he'd have the line repaired in an hour or so. In real time, today, the first big, rolling, thunderous rain storm of the spring. I was supposed to meet TR for lunch, then get a load of my books and papers from the museum, but I'm not going anywhere now. Make a cup of tea and settle in with some escapist fiction: a Lee Child novel I'm pretty sure I've read before. The rain suddenly stops, and the power, which had been off, just as suddenly comes back on. These storms are almost always moving west to east, and my electricity comes from the west, so the power company would have had time to send a crew, to whatever sub-station, to reset whatever relay had tripped. There's yet another ugly mass of dark clouds coming in, I see them when I go out to pee, so I quickly make some toast and micro-wave some left-over fried rice, not because they're what I want, but because they're the first things I think about that I can do quickly. I know I'll lose power again. Write a few lines and SAVE, eat some warm food, and get back to my reading. When the electricity goes out again, there's light enough to read by. I have to say, I like not having an agenda, I do love reading. It's a transport, gets me out of myself, like watching a movie, or listening to The Passion of Saint Matthew, or Greg Brown, or any decent blues musician. No bird can look more ragged than a crow in a rainstorm. I nuke a couple of dead mice so the crows can more easily rip them apart. I have the thought that that's what I'm here for, to supply mice to crows. I have an offer, which I'll probably accept, to do some cooking; supplement my income and indulge a fantasy in a wave of the hand. Sure, I can do that, wait until you've tried my brisket.