Thaumata

The marvels of spring. Town is fully green and there's a beginning blush on the ridge. Picked up a load of my stuff from the museum, lunched with TR, stopped and talked with Terry about cooking a meal at his new gathering place, went to Kroger for whiskey and sushi, and beat a path for home. Came the long way around, all the way up the creek, stopping often to look at flowers. At the first ford the miniature iris are blooming. It's one of my favorites, like looking at a regular blue-purple iris through the wrong end of a telescope. Nearly swooned at Kroger as the lamb is hitting the remainder bin. This will go on for a couple of weeks, as some of the cuts are vacuum-packed. Bought a couple of packages today, shoulder chops, which I like to marinate and grill; picked up some baby turnips, which I'll cook with their greens and finish in a skillet with butter and peppers. In the not yet remaindered lamb section (looking at future meals) I noticed there were a great many smallish boned roasts and I imagine cutting one of them into steaks that I can pound out and roll around a stuffing. Rice, chorizo, roasted red peppers, whatever, I can make a stuffing out of tree bark. The Post-Easter Lamb Season. Next year I need to over-winter a mint plant, but in the here-and-now I found a patch of watercress in the creek, and that will go well, I think. TR and I talked about the opera we seem to be working on, and an odd thing happened. We'd stopped in the alley outside the back door of the pub, they have a couple of chairs there, and a large ceramic vessel, half-full of sand, that serves as an ashtray. So I usually stop there, and smoke a cigaret I had rolled waiting for my change at the bar. If TR isn't in a hurry (he's often in a hurry) he'll take a chair, and we'll talk. I'd spent many hours in the past week thinking that if there was a opera it was Appalachian in some fundamental way, Sacred Harp, snakes, stills in the hollow. And TR says, out of the blue, that maybe it should be an Appalachian Opera. Rings all kinds of bells for me. She, the soprano, is mother nature, merely going about her business. I start hearing it in my head. On a roll. Eating and sleeping, sure, I can do that, as teasel is my witness. Sense, it seems, is a relative term.