Harvesting Rain

I'd set my internal alarm clock to go off when the rain started. I needed wash water. Dust accumulates, so I let the first hour wash off the roof, then consolidate my store and put out a couple of buckets. Earlier, I'd finished a page, and I was hungry, made a very nice potato soup, which I had with Irish Cheddar, a damn fine cheese D turned me on to, black olives, and some small sweet gherkins. Two in the morning (pouring off water, cleaning buckets, and sticking your ass outside, even for a few moments in a cold fall rain, tends to wake you up) and I got a wee dram of whiskey, to shake the chill, and rolled a smoke. I feel moderately successful, in terms of preparation, and actually I'm probably too optimistic, when I found myself singing (I sing very badly) an oratorio about potato soup, soft water, and the healing powers of pot brownies. Someone had left some brownies in my mailbox. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Three in the morning and I'm not paranoid or anxious, I actually own the darkness; listen to some delta blues, think about people that are dead. The rain beats a patter on the roof. Meaning comes into question. Harvey always took the position that nothing meant anything, and even though I always felt that anything meant something we found common ground. I think about Harvey almost every day and he's been dead for thirty years. Especially I think about him when I'm sitting in the dark. He would recite vast stretches of Lorca in Spanish, late at night, after a huge scrounged seafood meal and way too much homebrew. An early walk, before the sun had cleared the ridge, and the leaves are ankle deep everywhere, and several feet deep where there's anything to pile up against. Starved when I get back home because I'd gotten side-tracked (another good title would be Side-Tracked, which has become an almost steady state for me) so I finished the potato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich. This soup is a winter survival food, reconstituted dried onion flakes in chicken broth, a can of whole or sliced potatoes, and a couple of tablespoons of powdered milk. Lots of black pepper. Whole pork loins are on sale and I'm going to get one to cure, maybe next week; it'll provide me with meat for a month. The great thing about curing a whole loin in the fridge is that you can cut off a couple of slices anytime and just coat the cut end with the curing mixture. My curing mix is always changing, I just keep a pint jar about half filled with a mixture, 2:2:1, kosher salt, light brown sugar, various ground peppers and whatever herb has struck my fancy. This is so easy, it's ridiculous, you rub the meat with the mix, put it on a rack in a pan in the fridge, rub it down every few days, then lightly smoke it, in whatever contraption you can devise. Freeze it in quarters, slice them before they're fully thawed. It's the very best breakfast meat of all time, and so lean it has to be fried in fat or oil of some kind. When Dad died this year, at 95, one of the first things I muttered, was that the bacon fat finally killed him. At the end he drank his beer on ice, with a sprinkle of salt, and lived on cornbread crumbled in a bowl of milk. Light rain dripping on the roof, and it's seriously dark. I listen to Bach, heat some water, wash some dishes, read about the joints used in constructing the trusses for the roof of Westminster Hall. They've carried the load for 600 years, which is no mean feat, and they're now half rotten, but they still carry the load. Overbuilding we call it, in the trades; not being engineers or mathematicians, we just muddle along.