Closer to Equal

Who knows what relics we hide away? I have a small wooden box, I don't remember where it came from, memory being what it is. It's hand carved and intricate, vaguely Celtic. Lined in velvet. I keep some worked pieces of stone in it, some bird points, an atl-atl weight in the shape of a whale's fluke, and the perfect skull of a small rodent. B was talking, giving me a lecture, actually, about not losing the essential heart of my paragraphs. He was correct. What's the phrase, when a farmer makes one last pass through a crop, 'laid by'. Only needs harvesting. He argued, convincingly, that I should be very careful about changing anything. Not that I could, of course. Or that I would. So many pages, and so little time. But I did read a year, 2013, in which I kept the titles, and I liked the way it sounded. Lots of alliteration; and hard stops, where I needed to take a breath. Whether I can fly or not begs the question. The fact is, I can barely hover, mostly I fall on my ass. But sometimes I do seem to get off the ground. Cleaning my pantry, I found a jar of whole, small, leached acorns, and thought I'd try a trick of Euell Gibbons. They were already cooked and dried, so I warmed them in the toaster oven and made a little thick simple syrup, flavored with strong, Class C maple syrup, stuck a toothpick in each one, dipped them in the syrup, then dried them on a paper plate. I use a fair number of paper plates because I don't have to wash them. Glazed Acorns (Euell calls them) are fantastic. Mine are all gone, but I only made a dozen or so. Didn't know I had the acorns. Try these at your next party. I suppose you could leach them in a large coffee can, with some holes in the bottom, with a wire holding it on the faucet, just drip enough to keep them covered, just a few small holes. Let it drip all night. If it was a very cold night, when you were dripping the faucets to keep the water lines from freezing, it wouldn't cost anything extra. I don't think the economics of using more acorns works out very well unless you cook on a wood cookstove. Next winter I'm going to develop a cattail pollen, acorn flour, chocolate chip cookie that could upend the trail-mix business. I don't have a source for chocolate, so I'll probably substitute dried fruit. Cattail pollen is very light, acorn flour is much heavier, so it's difficult to codify quantities. Grandma's recipes, come on, how large is a head of cabbage? Four hands-full? A pinch, a walnut of butter, two fingers of crushed rosemary; what's a splash of something?