Stiffening Breeze

After a hot and still mid-day the breeze picks up. Black Dell isn't happy, but I set up a small fan pointed at her nether regions and set about removing conjunctions and adding commas, alternatively adding conjunctions and deleting commas. It's interesting work, watching the way meaning changes. I'd picked up a few local tomatoes (Uglies) at the last Farmer's Market, made a nice pesto mayonnaise, and ate tomato sandwiches all day, one of them, the best, omitted the mayo, and was smeared with avocado. I roasted a few small sweet peppers in the toaster oven, then caramelized them in bacon fat. There are a couple of very good summer salads buried in there. Especially because I'd gotten a couple of small goat cheeses (remaindered) and some very good pickles (from the discontinued bin), and everything was tasting wonderful. If you roll the cheese rounds in good breadcrumbs and heat them until they almost melt they're good on anything. Any green vegetable, any salad, any sandwich. The open-faced broiled tomato sandwich, with goat cheese rounds and avocado, is something to write home about. Add a couple of slices of thick-cut bacon, and it is, actually, one of the best meals ever. The deli thick-cut bacon has been on sale for $2.95 a pound for several weeks and I've bought my share, half the price of Hormel, and twice as good, salted and gently smoked, for no particular reason I assume it's Hungarian. It could be Bulgarian. It's very good. I did a thing with Brussels Sprouts and bacon recently that was wonderful. Make any salad and wilt it with warmed bacon fat. When I was working on the Peter Jefferson project, Tom's dad, there was a market that carried whole slabs of Hungarian bacon for cheap. I lived on bean and bacon soup, and the wild greens I could gather in the fifteen acre apple orchard. And the apples, and the 200 row-feet of seedless blackberries. It was an amazing property in terms of bounty, gooseberries, English walnuts, hazel nuts, ancient asparagus beds, entire fence-rows of raspberries. I had no money but I dined very well. I nap, through the heat of late afternoon, and get back up when Black Dell is cooled by a midnight breeze, have a left-over fried potato sandwich, with tomato and onion, get a drink, roll a smoke, and fall into reverie. It's inescapable, the maze, as a rule always bear left, in practice, if no one is looking, I hack through narrow ox-bows. Fuck a bunch of mystery. We knew where the stream originated, at Swan Pond, and we knew where it deployed into Sesuit Creek, but we had never walked it completely. These tidal/spring creeks are odd but you should always carry an oyster knife. Cockles and mussels, and several times, the last years on the Cape, harvesting beds that I had seeded. Which is a good feeling, like leaving some fruit trees in a place you've lived. Years later, you go back, and there are kids making cider. There's a place, on the Cape, where my oysters are the dominate species. Up Quivet Creek there's a place, the only place, where a certain oyster is available; it's my oyster, The Peeping Tom, briny overtones with a hint of rotten fruit. We could talk about blue cheese, the gamut of rotten things, kimchee, pickled sheep testicles, but this is my oyster; I like them with just a dash of hot sauce. Sometimes I slice a grape-tomato on top and smear them with a wasabi wash. For several years, I was the oyster king, my kin are legion; while Genghis Khan was screwing every maiden east of the Caucus, I was collecting gold. I like that fish sauce with the baby on the label. Michael calls and he has a modem for me and he's coming out my way. Hope springs eternal.