To Scale

Ten degrees of frost and falling. When I go out to pee the ground is solid, which is a good thing, because I'd been tracking mud inside for several days. The house is dry (and quite warm) so I bring in some wood to give off surface moisture, then mop the entry. I always have a pot of water on the stove, a three gallon soup pot, so I have hot water on demand, which I consider a great luxury, and eventually, even on the coolest surface of the cookstove, it begins to steam. No mold on the books, which is my ultimate test. I'd brought home a couple of firewood rounds, a red maple that's adapted to what we might call a Water Maple, it's not great wood, it makes a lot of ash, but it warms one of those border-line nights, when you might just be reading a book. In my recent Goodwill haul there is a Coca Cola cookbook that I find absolutely hysterical. I seem to remember my Mom glazing a baked ham with it. Also it's very good for getting dead bugs off a windshield. I refrain from running out and buying a can, having gone years without drinking a soda. The recipe for brisket is telling: a pouch of Lipton Onion Soup, a jar of chili sauce, a can of coke, cook at 325 degrees for three hours. Is that not elegant? Glad I picked up the tenderloin as there's snow in the forecast, late tonight and tomorrow, with temps down into the teens. I need to carry in a few arm-loads of wood. Forgot to buy a snow-shovel. For years I've used a square of marine plywood bolted to an old scythe handle, but it died last March, and I keep forgetting to buy a replacement. I could trick something out, with a piece of metal roofing and a mop handle, but Chuck, at the hardware store, swears by the new, light-weight, durable plastic model. I'm tough on tools, but he says this one would last for several years, even with abuse. Found my circuit tester quite by accident today. I'd been looking for it the past year and today I was rummaging through some tools, looking for my speed-square, and there it was. Maybe now I can repair the back porch light. I've got a great new fixture, a double spot, and I can direct one of them on the compost pile. Stage lighting, in effect. Enough watts to disorient any intruder, so I could beat them with a stick of firewood, or a bronze fire-hose nozzle, or the self-handled stone hammer I keep close at hand. I was laughing out loud about some of the Coca-Cola recipes, and caught myself having too much fun, as a quasi-academic I should be above clapping my hands and shouting 'Jesus', my team in a bar-game, but I'm actually only good on stuff that happened before 1911. Light snow and cold. I've got a piss-pot inside, but I like to go outside, taste the air, breathe deep, at least until everything gets slick with ice. Low-land flooding; the bottoms, will be sheets of ice. The Mississippi flooding means the Ohio slows down and it floods. The normal floods are usually in the spring, floods are normal, but the big floods are usually winter events, when the ground is frozen and there's no place for the water to go. I'm letting the fire go out, so I can clean ashes and the smoke chase; and I'll bring in some more wood. I have a lot of food, coffee and tea, whiskey and tobacco, I just have to watch my step.