Hard Rain

Staccato drumming becomes sheets of rain. TR would reproduce this sound with lentils poured unto a cymbal. It sounds like compressed language to me. All the water that ever was, what we have now, filtered and re-filtered. Condensed and sublimated, frozen and melted, shaken or stirred, it all moves back out to sea. My piss as well as yours. Clouds, rain, various salts as a by-product, the world is a closed system. I give it my waste and I expect tomatoes in return. Good sleeping. Clearing off by mid-morning, so I went to town, library, Kroger, and I was sitting outside the pub having a cigaret when a middle-age couple stopped, she was finishing a cigaret, complete strangers, and they bought me lunch and a beer. I'm sure they thought I was homeless. I was looking a bit ratty. The staff got a kick out of it, most of them have been to my house, most of them for dinner. Stopped down at B's on the way home, and he had a couple of non-fiction books for me to read. One of them is a study of dogs, the other a book of crazy questions with closely reasoned answers. I got three fictions at the library, to read over the holidays, and the big double-issue of the New Yorker arrived and I'm saving it too. The seafood delivery at Kroger is early tomorrow, so I need to zip in and get my oysters, before the crowds. Kroger is probably the busiest place in town. Stopped at the museum and looked at the new shows, chatted with TR and Emily. B said he'd been reading non-stop, resting, after teaching five courses for a semester. Resting, for him, means he only hauls wood for four hours a day. There was a pile of books, next to his reading chair, and he was looking a little homeless himself, a bit stove-up from getting most of next year's firewood, and in his work clothes. We talked about books for an hour. Later, back on the ridge, sipping a wee dram, thinking life is good, the house is warm, I'm comfortable in my skin. I have a dozen books to read, and oysters coming in tomorrow. Squash and onions put away in leaves. Trial run of a dish for Xmas. The menu is Oyster Stew (interestingly, in the fish section of Kroger a I'm now known as the guy who gets oysters on Thursday, and my dozen is now 15 or 16), flounder roll-ups stuffed with crabcake, and roasted Brussels Sprouts. Since the crabcakes are already cooked and the flounder fillets are thin this will cook very quickly, so I make one for lunch. As a test. I fix it closed with a spear of carrot, salt and pepper, lemon juice, then braise it (with a lid) in butter and a little white wine, pan sauce. It's very good and incredibly easy, I could make this for 50 or 100 people easily. The produce guy gave me a bag of Brussels Sprouts. There was another vegetable we cultivated in Mississippi that I've never seen in a market, a trick I learned. We raised a lot of cabbage and it was a long growing season, so after cutting off the heads, I'd cultivate around the base and feed them a little manure water, many of them would re-sprout little miniature cabbage heads, larger than Brussels Sprouts, sweet and succulent. We called them Cabbage Sprouts, but they probably have a actual name in France. The good news is that The Salvation Army bell-ringers will be gone in a couple of days and the cashiers at Kroger can take off those dumb hats. The long-range forecast says I'll be able to get to town next week, before New Year, and stay off the roads during the peak DUI season. The holidays are more an obstacle than anything else. I usually just go for a walk, open a bottle of wine, and cook something. Read a book. Maybe I'll wash my hair. If it rains on a holiday, I might take a sponge-bath. Usually my older daughter calls, and we talk about theater and live performance.