Corn Bread

I wanted corn bread but it was too warm to get a fire going that would heat the oven to 400 degrees. Months ago I'd found a generic six-inch cast iron skillet at the camp ground down at the lake. The handle was broken. It fits perfectly in the toaster oven. It needed cleaning and curing. I cleaned up the jagged break, then cleaned it in lye water, rinsed and rinsed (I have a lot of rain water right now); started a small fire in the cookstove and heated it slowly, wiped down with walnut oil. After a couple of hours, I re-treated the inside with hot chili oil. At this point I had been working on a broken skillet all day, but I was ready to make a pone of cornbread. One cup of Logan Mill yellow cornmeal, one egg, one teaspoon of baking powder, one half teaspoon of baking soda, enough milk to make it barely pourable; pre-heat the skillet (this is critical), add a teaspoon of bacon fat, scrape in the batter. It should sputter a little bit. Excellent result, except that I underestimated the heat that could be contained in a cast-iron skillet and managed to burn a ridge across the fingers of my right hand. "Ira furor brevis est." Horace, anger is a passing madness, or something close to that. Doesn't put me off my feed. I immediately ate half the pone with butter. Felt I had spent a positive day, in that I can now make cornbread year around, which I find interesting, that I hadn't done before. Right, ok, we've been here earlier in this argument, what you do and do not do. Time factoring. It's April now, which means nothing, actually, except that the sun rises and sets in a slightly different place. When I was a young writer, I preferred writing against a blank wall, now I prefer windows. Go figure. The world opens out.