Leaf Fall

Swirling winds in the afternoon bring down some leaves, singletons, that flutter down like dying butterflies. A brief morning walk noting the subtle transition of seasons, then back home for codfish cakes. Several hours with an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, tracking down some words. I have three bookmarks, already, in the Macfarlane, on one of which I write page numbers that correspond to pencil dots that mark sentences I want to enjoy again; that bookmark stays with the book. The other two are recycled when I've reread a passage after finishing a book. I think of these as stationary bookmarks, because the one with the numbers is the actual where-I-am-in-the-book marker. It's confusing even to me. My Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable has maybe thirty stationary bookmarks (in this case I used small yellow Post-It slips) and a permanent bookmark with nearly a hundred page numbers. Some of the page numbers add a single word, to designate category, but most of them just indicate a nice word or turn of phrase. Once a week, at least, I refer to Brewer, so I can always entertain myself by flipping to the pages I've marked. Pannage is a great word, letting pigs loose, to forage acorns in the fall. I actually did this, for years in Mississippi, and I always just called it free-ranging pigs; I've used the word several times, in imaginary conversations, so I assume it makes perfect sense. I pronounce it with a slight French accent. There's a great Spanish ham made from acorn-fed hogs, but the best cured meat I've ever eaten is probably B's cured loin and a couple of hams I cured with Big-Head White. It's actually quite easy to cure meat if you have a refrigerator. Roy and I both cured loins and hams in refrigerators, or had access to them, in case there was a warm spell in November (Mississippi Falls usually went through November). Plus we could kill a hog any time of the year. Roy made his living on pork. Big-Head had a cave, a storm cellar, in the side of a clay-bank, where he did his curing. He'd brine hams and slabs of bacon for a few days, then dry them off and rub them with a salt, pepper and sugar rub, bury them in a box of salt, taking them out, every few days and rubbing them with the mixture. After a few weeks of this he smoked them, for several days to more than a week, depending on what it was, then hung them in the bunker. Every couple of days, for a couple of weeks, he'd paint them with a mixture of flour, water, and ground black pepper. He liked a ham to hang for at least a year: they never had a single weevil. Armour-plated hams, takes a serious hammer blow to knock off the crust, then you take a few slices and soak them in milk, fry them in bacon fat, make biscuits and red-eye gravy; this is very good, with a egg-yolk leaking down the side and a single malt whisky. Come on, it doesn't get any better than that.