Outside Pressure

After a nap, I cleaned up from dinner, then, finally, cleaned out the fridge. I needed the six-quart cast-iron pot to make soup, which meant cleaning, drying, and re-treating. I had collated various dabs of waste into another pot which needed to be buried in the compost heap, so I put on my bathrobe and slippers, then my headlamp. I keep a shovel outside the back door and was not surprised to find it snowing. Lovely, and not that cold, 25 degrees, and it only takes a few minutes to bury the food scraps, dump the stove ashes and the piss-pot. I lingered, smoking a cigaret and tracking snowflakes in the beam of my light. Back inside I washed the final pot, then dumped the dishpan, stoked the fire, and got a wee dram of single-malt. I would have watched an old movie, sentiment counts for something, but I don't have a TV. It's so quiet, after I kill the breaker for the refrigerator, that I stopped reading Swedenborg, which is incredibly boring, and just stared into space. It's not actually silent. The stove makes a myriad of sounds. Two layers of cast iron, temperature differences, expansion and contraction; and the leaves, outside, are subject to the least disturbance; so it's never completely quiet. Eight inches of new snow, on a February morning, without electricity, trapped on a ridge-top, is close; but even then, the house creaks, and branches break under load. Cage indicated that we should listen closely. Wait,