Baked Beans

Beans on toast with sweet onion. Up early because I'd left windows open and I was freezing. 40 degrees outside, the frogs and birds are quiet, hunkered down, no doubt. I shut the windows and pull on a sweatshirt. Just breaking dawn, blue through the green, and when I went out to pee I was amazed by the weight of air and moisture. That fecund smell of spring. It's not oppressive, exactly, but reminds me of a ripe cheese. Roll a smoke and take a mug of coffee out on the back porch. A can of sand I use as an ashtray is damp in the morning dew. Rain hangs ready. The ground evaporates as a kind of fog but the air is already saturated and the vapor recondenses about eight feet off the ground. It wasn't raining, but there was a veil of suspended water. My sweatshirt was limp and heavy and water was beading on my forehead. The green wall of trees, new leaves limp in the moisture, are poised to convert sunlight into energy. There's a lesson in that. When I went back inside, I started a small fire, poplar and maple, just to drive off the humidity, and to cook some bacon and eggs. I love cooking potatoes in bacon fat and I do love a perfect fried egg. It can't kill me early anymore. Then a small sad rain that looks to go on forever. I'm reading a book about dust, titled Dust, when I could be cleaning house, but it's so beautifully quiet I sit and muse and read. An excellent morel and goat cheese omelet, with toast and a very god marmalade that I made from tangerines. I used to occasionally buy frozen tangerine juice, but I can't find it anymore. I poked around the fish counter, the last time I was in town, and found a package of discounted cod, which is fine for fish cakes (poached fillets, left-over mashed potatoes and finely minced shallots) which brings back memories of Cape Cod, night-fishing on the outer beach with Winslow, then making and freezing enough fishcakes to last until the next time. Trying to remember what year, maybe 1969, the first year I stayed on the Cape the year around. Just enough money (I was house sitting) to not work in the winter, if I scrounged most of my food from the littoral, which I did, on my daily walks. For that first winter I didn't have a vehicle, I just walked everywhere I needed to go. I made a few bucks playing poker, hung around the small library, and met a few other eccentrics walking the sand dunes at odd hours. A motley but extremely bright group of people. The Post-Grad group. Edward Gorey showed up at the print shop. I got some grants, I printed some books, I made some paper, at one point I was one of the best printers in these United States. Canadians hate when we say American. I try and not offend anyone, it's rarely my intent. I do occasionally get my dander up, when someone says something stupid, but usually I let it slide, I rarely argue with anyone.