Standard Practice

Power was out again this morning, and Alice, at Adams County Rural Electric said that they were replacing the failing piece of equipment that had caused the last outages. Told me they would be done by noon. Went outside and hauled wood, then split some. I'll split more tomorrow, as I seem to do on holidays. I wandered off to the west, harvesting a couple of small dead poplar saplings, and I found two perfect deer beds. The leaf layer was ideal for preserving them. Shallow ovals (they sleep curled), uniformly dried. They're a lovely artifact of nature. A few flakes of snow, nothing, really, but a reminder; and I got turned around. I was thinking about minnows, got distracted and walked about a bit before I found the graveyard. Then it was an easy path home. Cold, but I caught the fire, fried potatoes and sausage, then scrambled eggs with them, topped with Kimchi. Toast with a very bitter marmalade. Excellent. I could get a job in a Korean diner in the combat zone. Usually I make my own sausage, just because mine is better, but sometimes I buy something I haven't seen before, and I found a great, local, whole hog sausage that is as good as anything I make. Late afternoon and there's some gunfire, deer hunters, and I make a note to stay out of the woods for the rest of the weekend, lucky I didn't get my ass shot off earlier. Sure enough, two good-old boys show up just before dark, needing a ride down to their truck and permission to haul a dead deer across my property and down my driveway. I have to re-boot, bank the fire, and pee. They're standing at the staircase, while I make sure the house is safe, nothing plugged in, nothing on the stove. One of them said that I must read a lot. There are 36 feet of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, piles of books on every flat surface, and several precarious stacks of journals on the floor. Yes, I said. It was a race against the dark. Drove them down, they were parked a mile up the road, where the church used to be. They followed me back up and parked at the top of the hill, I turned around, so I could shine my headlights on their truck, they dumped accessories (they carried a lot of accessories) and took their very good LED flashlights back into the woods. I had a nip of single malt and rolled a smoke, sitting on their tailgate. It was a nice young buck, two-years old, six-point, and I had the better knife. I got the heart, which they didn't want, and finally got them on their way; got back home, heated water, washed up, trimmed and cleaned the heart, and considered the fact that I had too much food. I have to eat the heart tomorrow, fresh organ meat, I can freeze the veal, and thank god I didn't start cooking the beans. A thin sliced heart sandwich, with horseradish sauce, is a gift from the gods. Remind me to tell you about the year it snowed in August. Imagine that.