Broken Clouds

Partly sunny in the afternoon, with sunlight in those occasional slanted shafts that illuminate a narrow band of the forest floor. Spent most of the day in and out of reverie, remembering things, reading myself. Crazy swings, and it got warm enough (45 degrees) that I let the stove go out so I could clean the smoke chase. Temps are supposed to fall to near zero tomorrow, so I put off my cooking until then, and make do with a sardine sandwich. With a slice of raw onion it's very good. Dappled light, in the late afternoon, is beautiful. If it doesn't snow too much, I should be able to get out and in when the driveway freezes again. I'm pretty well supplied right now, though I wish I had some almonds and chocolate. Later, I think, I'll make a re-fried potato, sausage and cheese omelet; I have these onion flakes I get at Big Lots, reconstitute in Sherry, and make an interesting salsa with halved grape tomatoes and watercress. Toast, with a fairly bitter marmalade. Bitter, they say, is an acquired taste. I've acquired it. I think about the word bitter, for a while, bitter taste, bitter experience, then watch a pair of cardinals signaling their intentions. The Anne Tyler didn't ring any bells, maybe I'm just dense, maybe it was a mistake, maybe some devious person is shoveling red-herring on my stoop. No reason to mislead me, I'm misled enough. It does seem like a Dorothy Sayers novel, though; Lord Peter noticing that the perp was left-handed, quite tall, and favored his right leg. Harriet noticed a water-mark that was wrong. The whole narrative fell apart, he could have been there, slashed her throat, been out the back door before anyone noticed. Even facts are a relative thing. The dumpster was moved by the garbage company, words were shared that triggered some response. A perfectly thrown elbow and a broken nose. Everyone loves a good mystery. Actually I spent the day reading On The Run by Alice Goffman. Her father Erving is who got me reading Sociology in the first place. He was brilliant on 'other'. The book at hand is several years' study of a poor inner-city black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Quite different, but somehow equivalent to the time I spent immersed in black culture in Babylon, Duck Hill, Mississippi. My entry into that was mostly the food, but I was often the only white person around, trying to understand what linguists call African American Vernacular English, and cooking with Roy. We had some times. His family and friends had no choice but to accept me, because Roy was the Patriarch, and he was also six feet four and weighed 300 pounds. He was on hard times one winter and I told him to come out to my place and I'd give him a hog, I had dozens of pigs, and we'd cook it as a fund-raiser. He had a great grill, mounted on a trailer, maybe three feet by six feet, a firebox at one end, chimney at the other; and didn't like cooking whole pigs unless they were small, because 'the requirements were different', so we slaughtered the hog at his place, then set up for cooking in downtown Duck Hill, which is essentially a cross-road. In a big pot we cooked Liver And Lights, a kind of Southern haggis, slow-cooked hams and shoulders and ribs, made sandwiches from the loins, made head-cheese and sausage, and raised over a thousand dollars, which was big money, rural Mississippi, 1985. Roy is my patron saint. He introduced me to a world that I didn't know existed: Big Head White and his crusted cured hams, persimmon chiffon pies, sweet potato rounds cooked in butter. The vernacular is always important.