Bashing Elders

If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. That's why Myrtle (bible-thumping grandmother on Mom's side) ,cooked the big meal before mid-day and left it on the table. I always preferred a monster breakfast, a light lunch (a can of sardines, some olives), then a huge hit of carbohydrates in the evening, with a bottle of wine. Anymore I eschew the hard physical labor, leave it for the young bucks, I'd rather read fiction. I've lived a fairly natural life, chopping wood, hauling water, and at this point I'm worn to a nub. I'd rather pull up a lap-blanket and disappear into the history of dust. Listening to Patsy Cline, looking at the cobwebs and dust-motes of my life. Bonny singing with John Lee. The tension that creates, a black snake in the woodpile. I go about my business, humming an Allman Brothers tune, Duane on lead guitar, echoes of Boz Skaggs. Listen, even the fucking refrigerator hums a middle C. Excuse me while I re-tune the piano, Phil Oakes right? Camping in Comb Wash Bach is always in the background. It's Canyon Country and the sound reverberates. Change ringing. Nine Tailors for Master Mark. One doesn't walk widdershins, It's all left turns on the race track. Booby's wife, Diane, is absolutely petrified of the bear. She went into shock when she heard he had been under my house for several days. She strongly recommended that B and I both stay out of the woods. No chance of that, but it's nice to know someone cares. Actually, you can live your entire life and never see a bear in the wild. It's not a good acorn year, it's a two year cycle, and there is a decreased squirrel population. When you stare into the middle distance as much as I do, one thing you notice is horizontal movement. As the under-story opens up I can see deeper into the woods. There's always something going on. Sub-text, for instance, is a more or less constant background noise. I can distinguish specific animals from the way they sound walking on leaves, it's not a gift, it's something I've learned from hundreds of hours of listening, and I love starting fires with just a butter parchment wrapper and a few twigs. Simple pleasures. First fire of the season, so I make the first biscuits of the season. I have a little stainless steel pan with a long handle I use to heat sorghum molasses. A hot biscuit with butter and warm sorghum is a wonderful thing. Then bacon, a fried egg, and another biscuit to clean the plate. Now that Aunt Pearl is dead and Mom's in a nursing home, I probably make the best biscuits in the world. The secret is handling the dough as little as possible. A split and toasted biscuit, the next day, is as close to heaven as I ever need to be. Not that I wouldn't aspire to something heavenly, lord knows, ankle bells, fish eggs, and morels, but I sense my limitations. I would never, for instance, wear a tie. I was at some formal event recently, where my doeskin jacket and open collar denim shirt had attracted some attention. I'd traded a Purdey shotgun for the jacket. At that point I'd spent a year curing deer hides. Dog shit, brains, countless washings, and I never ended up with a single useful piece of leather. I've failed at any number of things. I set out to collect a cubic foot of various things and that ended up being a disaster; relative humidity in play. Even a cubic foot of clay is suspect.