Spring Text

Sassafras, and now the sumac are budding. There's a blush of color in the hollow. Cold water from the wet-weather springs is the sweetest I've ever tasted. Enough morels for a omelet, split toasted cornbread with red onion jam. The 'Fresh Eggs' signs have begun appearing, and in this flush, I'm eating a lot of them. If I supply the carton, I usually get eggs for $2 a dozen, which is often cheaper than at the store, and I eat about a dozen a week. The Order Of The Omelet. I would never wear a coat with tails, nor display awards, what did I tell Diane? That I could give up a day spent reading and writing to be with her, talk about the things we shared in common. Of course I could, look forward to, am excited about, I'm not immune to social contact. But most of it is crap. I'd rather be alone. As I understand it, The Battle Of The Nile, was about denying Napoleon North Africa. Egypt. Napoleon is like a Randy Newman song. Putin. Trump. The first Whip-O-Will, but it doesn't have its song down yet, like an orchestra tuning up. Fairly often I'd be sleeping in an aisle, having shut down my crew so the orchestra could rehearse. There are few things better than hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra tuning up. Maybe sex with an alien, but I've never done that. But I did hear the BSO tune up twenty times. It always struck me as Eastern music. Hot day, over eighty degrees and shut down Black Dell when I went out mushrooming. More than a dozen morels, so I chop them with an onion, brown in butter, and add a can of chicken broth. Mashed potatoes make a great thickening agent. I serve this on toast, it's one of my favorite things. A good conversation with Samara in Denver, wondering about the snow there. She said the roads were dry, the plowed piles were melting, and they needed the moisture. No problem getting around; the ridge, I tell her is much the same. I need to get to town, and tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful, so my intention is to stop by the pub, buy some potato wedges on the way home, an order of fried stuffed jalapeno peppers, and hole up with some fiction. Samara calls back, to extend the conversation, but Kinsey had come over to talk about books, and that takes precedence. And she had brought a dozen farm fresh eggs. Pullet eggs, but none the less, three will get you two. My clothes are generally frayed and stained, but clean. On long sea-duties, blockades and such, fresh water was a problem for personal washing and clothes. Usually clothes were rinsed in urine, as a kind of bleach, then washed in seawater. This must have been damned uncomfortable. Pooping was not done from the poop-deck, but at the bow of the ship, the heads, which were just planks with holes in them, in a man-of-war ten each side, depending on the tack, the sailors mostly hung in the rigging and dropped their drawers to the leeward. Toilet paper was a problem. There wasn't any. And the food, my god, was awful. 500 to 800 men on a ship 200 feet by 60 for two years. Oatmeal, cooked in last night's fat, for breakfast. That fat, called slush, was saved daily, half went to the ship, for treating ropes, the other half made a 'slush-fund' for the cooks, to sell to the tallow merchants when they made land-fall. Cook fires were extinguished during battle. Rat jerky was fairly common. Scurvy was common, but by 1805 it was known that citrus could prevent that, so grog (two issues a day) was now one measure of rum, two of water, and one of lemon juice, with a taste of molasses. On shaved ice, with a sprig of mint, this is still a pretty good drink.