Frozen Drain

It warms to almost freezing but everything is still frozen. I have to wash dishes in a dishpan and throw the water outside, not a big deal, just don't throw the water where you need to walk. Slops go off to the side. The muffled sound of snow is oddly reassuring. Us rednecks tend to die in harness. Queen Maud. Three crows calling for their dues. I don't maintain that any of it makes sense, but I play the game. It's supposed to get bitter cold again almost immediately, but, for the moment, the house is warm, two in the morning, so I stay up to write for a couple of hours. Made a cheese omelet with toast, read at the island for an hour. Jim Harrison cooking dinner with some hunting buddies at a cabin in the Upper Peninsula. The drain will be frozen for the rest of the winter, but I've found I use less water if I wash dishes in a dishpan, so I don't really care. It's awkward, going out to throw the slops, but I keep a chair (a straight-back porch chair from Selma, Alabama) near the back door and change into studded rubber boots. The dishpan requires two hands, so I'm very careful. I don't like walking on ice without a stick. When I get to town again, and I need a few things, it will have been a week since I left the ridge. A week is good, you need to be able to do a week without thinking about it; a month, if things turn for the worst. What I've learned is that things usually get better. It wasn't an actual threat, it was just a test, what you need to do is pick up the pieces. I could as easily argue that hauling wood could be done mechanically or with hired labor, but it wouldn't be the same. Another cold night, it never did get above freezing yesterday nor today and back down to 10 or 12 degrees tonight. Outside only briefly as I should have Saturday and Sunday to restock the house and it's supposed to get warmer. Had a nice fire going all day and by bedtime I'll have burned an entire rick, which is about as much as is possible to burn. I'll have to leave the electric oil-filled radiator going tonight. I've started bringing the outhouse toilet seat inside and storing it near the stove. I think a ham and bean soup is next. Six books read in the last six days, which is more or less normal, all fiction, so I was glad to hear from the public library that they were holding a couple of things for me. Tuchman's China book, and a book about the Papacy. Thus, a trip to town, but I can pick up a few things, have new books, start a soup on the cookstove, then split wood and build ricks on the weekend; and the driveway is passable, which makes it all possible. Just settled in with a drink and a smoke when I get a call from an old friend in California. I hadn't heard from him in years, but he found me; he said that on Google Earth I showed up as what might be a driveway. The green roof was a good idea. He's still out on the road, the advance man for rock-and-roll shows, he'd found some of my writing somewhere online, and wanted to tell me that he was impressed I was still alive. I had to laugh. Later, after we'd hung up, I sat for an hour thinking about that. Not so much lucky as careful. The last of the stew is hot and the last of the pone of cornbread is toasted. I have to go.