Thinking Back

Got off the ridge, it had been a week and I needed a few things. I wanted to make lasagna, and I was into my back-up whiskey. Country roads are lovely this time of year. The snakes are out, dead on the roads, slipping away at night to suck the heat from a roadbed. I stop and throw them off the road. there was a crushed box turtle and I scooped the remains onto a plastic bag. When I got home, I cleaned off all of the shell pieces and spent an evening super-gluing the shell back together. This is at least as good as watching a decent show on TV, or watching a movie. Some pieces lock together, a dozen or more perfect connections, some are more vague, I have to say, the whole idea for doing this was lifted completely from Thoreau, either at Walden, or just before, he'd reconstructed a turtle shell. Stopped at The Buckeye Diary Bar on the way home for a large vanilla shake and marveled how good it was. Simple pleasures. Avocados are cheap right now, 69 cents, so I bought a bunch of those, I mostly eat then right out of the shell, with lime juice and black pepper, sometimes with salsa, I love the mouth-feel; sometimes on toast with hot pepper jam. Not wanting to start a fire, I made an extremely easy lasagna with pre-cooked noodles and a tomato/meat sauce from a jar, cheese, and topped it with morels cooked in butter. Cooked it in the toaster oven. This worked very well. I'd been to the library and gotten some topical fiction, so after a nap, I just stayed up all night reading. I figured I could sleep tomorrow, it's supposed to rain anyway. I need to restore a semblance of order to the piles of books, and I think I can put the rest of the firewood to rest in the wood-box, clean up the wood debris. A winter's accumulation of cast-iron skillets that needed to be treated and hung from the beam in the kitchen, books that need to be shelved, duck thighs that needed to be submerged in pork fat. But I'm good with this, especially if D arrives with a load of white oak stumps. I always park at the side of Kroger, so I can get out the back way. Going out that way, the second street bridge over the Scioto, the red maples are dominate. It seems they can digest anything. Which is quite a talent. Both rivers, the Scioto and the Ohio, flood frequently here, and these trees often keep their roots in water (from which, if you eat the fish at all, once a month is the recommended maximum) that smells of diesel fuel and sewage treatment plant. The muskrats are thriving though. No one traps them in town. They favor a backwater where a crude and ugly jetty alters the flow of the Ohio. It's a swirling debris field, and there are lots of dead minnows, which suit the muskrats just fine. I love watching them. They're almost as cool as otters. Dad knew about otters, he was always surprising me with things he knew about, but an important aspect of being a country kid was knowing your environment, and he had learned that where an otter slide came down a bank and into the water there was likely a spawning bed for perch (sunfish, bluegills) and that would be a good place to fish. During the Depression, when buying shotgun shells was a luxury, he only shot quail when they were crossing and he could get two with one shot. Raised as an orphan, by an extended family, everyone pulled for the commonweal. When Dad finally got an outboard motor (late 50's?) we'd go way up Julington Creek, looking for otter slides. Not often, but once in a while, if we were very still, the otters would come to play. A Walt Disney movie based on a short story by Poe, or a movie based on a Kafka scenario. Then you couldn't access this area, except by water, now it's completely connected, bridges and roads with exits. Shell-crackers, another perch, tended to feed on bridge abutments, little freshwater mussels that collected there, and I loved their fillets, dipped in cornmeal, fried in hot lard. I haven't deep-fried fish in years, though I still make hush-puppies. My recipe is about five thousand years old; three thousand years ago they started adding an egg, a thousand years ago they started adding minced onion/pepper. I use a melon baller, to form them, and they're a perfect bite-size; Carlene, who makes the best hush-puppies in the world, forms them with two tablespoons, they're larger, two bites, which is a bonus if you're spreading something on them. I recommend a morel tapinade, drinking an old-vines zinfandel, Miles in the background, Kind Of Blue, your hand, still slick, on someone's thigh. You might tap an off beat. I've listened to B/B maybe a hundred times, the Cello Suites at least that many times (two hours and fifteen minutes, on average), two other albums, from that time, were the Grateful Dead in Europe, and an Allman Brothers Band compilation where Dwayne and Dickey duke it out. This was about the same time as Boz Skaggs first album. Dwayne is amazing on that, extraordinary guitar playing. "Buddy can you spare me a dime...". That's what's his name, Stephen Foster, and a chorus in the background, great arrangement, John Phillips, that fucking brass, but I'd actually rather just be left alone, a dire wolf, the last of a dying breed.