Quiet Day

The weather is supposed to hold for a while, so I take off an entire day and read. Several issues of The London Review of Books, a New Yorker, a Thomas Perry novel. Cheese, crackers, gherkins, olives. I bake a potato and an onion in the firebox of the stove, then partially freeze the beef so I can slice it thin, then do a stir-fry with a red pepper and reduce a butter and wine sauce. Instead of rice, I serve it on a bed of baked potato and onion. It's excellent. Reminds me of a Mongolian dish I had in Atlanta once, cooked on an inverted cone of metal over a live fire. Big Roy's grilled ham sandwiches, with the bone in, and sauced, was one of the great meals ever, the last bite was always the marrow smeared on a smidgen of crust. The crows are back, as if they expected a catered event, baked mice with a remoulade. I get back up at two to stoke the stove, but I need to let it die so I can clean out the ashes and the smoke chase tomorrow. Might go to town and have lunch with TR as I haven't seen him since before xmas. The smoked tea, with cream and sugar and a tipple of whiskey makes a nice toddy. Talk about simple pleasures. I had reading matter spread everywhere, two toddies (because I'd misplaced one), a spread of snacks at the island, several dictionaries opened to different words. A ripple of pleasure, I thought, to be thus located. What I took to be tangerines in the food basket Michael left for me at B's were probably Clementines, so I make a small batch of marmalade. Citrus cross-breed in interesting ways. Hot marmalade on toasted biscuits is a wonderful thing. The next time I call rooster, you'll hook up the plow. Just a trace of condescension, but I have, after all, broken new ground with a turning-plow. Behind a recalcitrant mule, grants me a certain latitude. Not in the normal sense of things, what you would expect, but in that more covert part of your brain, where you hide things.