Quiet Weather

I'd been hearing rain or wind, usually both, for several days and the quiet woke me. Just the snaps and crackles as the stove cooled. I caught the fire, opened the damper and stoked the stove; which meant staying up an hour, so I could damp things down again and go back to sleep. It's become a good time for me to think and write. No distraction. Since the oven was hot (450 degrees) I made a small pone of cornbread. A six-inch cast-iron skillet. One cup of cornmeal, an egg, soured milk, leavening; preheat the skillet with peanut oil until just before it smokes, bake for 20 minutes. I always flip the pone over, as my mother did, so that the top of it can toast on the hot metal. At our house, as in most of the houses I had ever eaten in, cornbread was always served upside down, sliced in wedges, and there was always a tub of butter. Hot cornbread and soft fresh butter is one of those great combinations. The bean soup, on a split wedge of cornbread, toasted and buttered, in a shallow bowl, eaten with a spoon, is a great treat. Just a mug of cornbread and sweet milk might get you through the night, but warm-from-the-pan cornbread spreads a little magic. Another gray morning. Mix of rain and sleet. Burning wood at a copious rate and I'll need another dead tree for January and February, but it's already picked out, close to the house, and will fall on the driveway. Easy pickings. My good friend, The Utah Kid, may be leaving the extreme wilds of the remote west for the Pacific Northwest but he would still be The Utah Kid, just as Boston Bob was still Boston Bob in Ohio. The Kid, a physical therapist, said that I should keep at the brute labor, but in moderation, and, of course, to be careful. I'm so careful now my old crews would hardly recognize me. I have nightmares about falling, I have to get up and have a drink, roll a cigaret with shaking hands, and read some non-fiction. It was the end of the 14th century that artillery became an issue, castles weren't so keep any more. The Ottomans had some big guns. Gunpowder replaced armor. They had started making paper, 1350, then starting printing from movable type, 1450. Somehow, thinking about these things, I get my mind off of the failing scaffolding or whatever the last bad dream was. Sometime, during the afternoon, a ground fog filled the hollow then rolled over the ridge tops, a humidity differential between ground and air, temps just above freezing. Visibility is maybe 50 feet. Not seeing can be instructive, what your other senses tell you. Trapped in a cave, you lick your fingers and follow the drift.