Middle Child

The frost is so heavy nothing moves. A nuthatch chipping at a sumac head is a major event. The light is slow in coming because the overcast is so thick. I know I need to start a fire, but I'm so comfortable, wrapped in a blanket, that I don't want to move. I'd put on the small crock pot, with grits last night, and I wanted cheese grits for breakfast, with hot sauce and an egg; hungry and needing to pee, I finally did get up. The rest of the day progressed from there. I packed the grits into a plastic tube, so I could slice off rounds of polenta and fry them in pork fat. I had forgotten how much I like applesauce and it's fantastic on polenta with just a dribble of maple syrup. This big Dante biography is consuming a lot of my time; the Notes are all at the back, so I keep an extra bookmark there, to track down references, and by the end of a day I have piles of books on both sides of me. Snow was coming, I could smell it, so I went for an afternoon walk. I think of woodpeckers as solitary, but there were three red-headed of them, within my line of sight at one time. They seemed so intent that I felt like a slacker. The wind picks up and I walk home. After dark the wind becomes a roaring, and I sign off. Keep my headlamp handy. This week between Christmas and New Year, we usually get some weather. After talking with brother and sister, I don't think I suffer any ill effects from being a middle child. Mostly everyone left me alone. When Dad was on sea-duty (two years of a four year tour-of-duty) I was usually around females, Mom, my sister and their friends; my brother is ten years younger than me and he was still a kid when I left home. Leaving home happened so quickly. I'd applied for some work-study program in the Theater Department at college, and the lighting designer there drafted me into grunt labor at The Cape Playhouse the summer before I actually went to college. I simply left one world for another. The first show I did at FSU was "Aida" with a cast of 100 and a revolving stage, and the first musical I ever did was "Camelot". I hate musicals, too many sound and light cues. Reading Cavalcanti (Pound's translation) with a headlamp, the sound changes, I know it's snowing. A soft shuffle. It's cave dark outside the beam of my LED, which speaks volumes about the human condition. A good covering of snow, and, once again, the contour is revealed. Not so much dawn as a gradual unveiling. Barnhart calls and the new modem will be here on the third of January, he and his son will be right out with it that day or the next morning, his Mom was with them over Christmas and she gave him a raft of shit about not getting me fixed more quickly. We talked about music, as we always do, and then some recipes, fish cakes with a mustard sauce, wilted lettuce, corn cakes with applesauce.