Closing Time

Smoke gets in your eyes. Or a breeze off the ocean. My tears are salty, but when I touch my eyes, they sting because of salt. Walking in harsh weather mid-winter, I can barely see; when I get home nothing makes sense. I put on my favorite versions of the Cello Suites, a double bass transcription, and sit in the dark. The power went out and the music died. Black Dell had been off, because of the heat, so I put on my headlamp and wrote long-hand for a while, some notes on what I thought I might have written about. My notes take the form of single words followed by a dash, if more than 24 hours goes by, they make no sense to me. When I close down from a writing session I often skip down one line and leave a clue as to where I thought I was going. A couple of hot nights and I have to put a small fan blowing directly on me to get any sleep at all, then get up at my usual three in the morning to write for a few hours. D had called, he had a load of firewood for me and will bring it out soon. The very fact that firewood of this caliber is available so cheap ($20 a pick-up load) is a testament to living in the hardwood capital of the world, ricked and air-dried under a roof. This load is rejected staves from the cooperage, and he's promised me a load of stumps for night-time wood. Answers the first of my winter worries. I'm saving the rest of Thoreau's journals for next winter, and in the fall I'll restock the larder. I'm hoping Big Lots will have socks and underwear at some point between now and November, so that I can avoid a trip to Wal-Mart. My clothing budget for the year will come to about twenty dollars. In late November I'll buy a case of whiskey (10% discount, one single malt, one Irish whiskey, and ten of my Kentucky sour-mash) and I always keep enough tobacco and papers to last for six weeks. I didn't have to call in a single marker, last year, for anyone to bring me anything. I do want a new printer, if it's possible to get one that can connect with Black Dell, because I have two manuscripts that I need to see in hard copy. I'll buy a new system, if necessary, but several people said (and everyone knows more about this than me) that I should just continue using my current archaic system until something better is available. Might be on the horizon, because Kim said he had a bar and could get emails, but couldn't send. Barnhart mentioned 'signal amplifiers' which in my case would be necessary, everyone agrees, because I'm on the very edge of reception. It's not by intent that I've moved to the outer fringes of acceptability, actually I think of myself as hopelessly normal. I eat and sleep and satisfy my addictions. Mid-winter, I track a line of thought, I forget about all creature comforts, forget meals, forge or cast a metal to mean what I say. The Bronze Age was quite short, in the scheme of things, 1340 years before coke and cast iron; skim the dross and pour what you need. The plow, a large part in the scheme of things. The earliest are Hornbeam or Ironwood, crotches shaped to cut the earth, but they suffered from glacial rocks: it was the iron plow that changed history. Large draft animals that could pull stumps and an iron plow that could turn over rocks. Later we developed red cauliflower. It's lovely. A large part of my winter diet depends on the fall displays at various coffee shops. I store acorn squash, butternuts, small pumpkins, in a hole under the house, layers of leaves, and I was just eating a cream soup, from last year's squash, that seemed perfectly fresh. And the last of last year's green beans. Home canned green beans, the simple method: green beans, a tablespoon of salt per quart, processed for thirty minutes, these are the green beans of your dreams. My test cured smoked hog jowl is still in perfect condition after six months, and this is good news as it means I can have cracklings or salt-pork cooked with beans at any time of the year. Speaking of nuts, I found a pound package of walnut halves in the discontinued bin, and I'd read a Chinese recipe for "Honey Nuts", which is a wonderful boiled, then toasted, then coated with a honey glaze, walnut thing that is truly spectacular. I restrain myself from falling into a nut coma. I was almost arrested once, for collecting pecans, across the road from a state pen in Mississippi, eight or ten trees pregnant with nuts and smashed kernels.