Still Raining

If this had all been snow, I'd be buried. Woke me, about three, when it started falling in buckets. We haven't had rain like this in quite a while, and I worry about the grader ditches. Just glad I got into town yesterday and have a dozen (16) oysters, everything for a butternut squash risotto, a couple of small steaks Scott sent over via B, and two jowls for making cracklings. The new Outhouse Calendar was in the mailbox. I didn't have a calendar last year, lost in the mail, and I only got confused a couple of times, not knowing what day it was. I also bought three bay scallops and a head of endive and can't believe I've invested $15 in a single-serving dish. I don't even know how to pronounce endive. This is what happens when you open up to other people. Barnhart reads me to his mother and she sends me a gorgeous cookbook, I read these recipes as if they were Faulkner short stories, Jim Harrison, and I had gone back to this scallop recipe several times; the next thing you know I'm buying scallops and endive. Just did an emergency SAVE, because I didn't want to lose that thought, and it rains even harder. "Blow, transformer, blow / all my troubles away...". The wind sets up a little howl, flowing over the ridge, it rattles branches, and rain becomes erratic, shifting direction. This is setting up the mother of all freeze thaw cycles. There's no place for the water to go. Turkey Creek is running in spate, even my little rill is making some noise. This terrain, hollows opening out to the flood plain, lends itself to inundation. Then everything becomes a sheet of ice. Occasionally you can walk under this ice, in creek beds, when the ice has frozen above. It's beautiful. The Scioto is out of its banks, and all of the low-lying bean fields are flooded. Temps are going to start dropping tonight, snow tomorrow night. I'd better shut down, it's getting biblical. Reading the new Bosch novel, Connelly is a good writer; some time after dawn I went back to sleep for a couple of hours. If you don't mind spending $15 bucks a serving, the scallops on braised endive and raw apples (sliced very thin) is an easy and very fast thing to fix. Don't cook the scallops for more than minute, literally. Brought in an armload of wood, though I had no intention of starting a fire, so it could thaw and release some surface moisture. Walked about half-way down the driveway and collected a gallon of spring water, which is quite cold and tasty. A cup of tea, later, I was thinking about relationships, how I had failed at most of mine. Which bothers me less, as time goes on, because the last fifteen years have been engaging, spending so much time alone, watching and listening to the natural world. It takes precedence, in the face of things. I don't like a lot of things I see and hear in the outside world, the world of commerce; I'd, frankly, rather be dissecting tadpoles, or sucking on oak galls, or frying minnows in pork fat, but I concede, whatever, the ways of the world. Rather one thing than another. Reading Basho tonight, winter of 1690, "usually hateful / yet the crow too / in this dawn snow". The wind is blowing a young gale. It's easy enough to wrap in my down bag and ignore the world.