Snow Falling

It started raining after dark, then I heard it change over to snow. If the temps had been lower, which they should have been, this time of year, there'd be three feet of snow. Stoke the fire, bake a pone of cornbread and have a slice hot, with butter and syrup. Ronnie has his taps and blue bags hanging on all the Sugar Maples. Ronnie's a piece of work, always busy, often bloody. Vertically integrated. Butcher shop, smoke house, making jams, baking bread, two gardens, the Farmer's Market, trapping and selling pelts. His energy exhausts me. Steely dawn, just a few inches of snow, and I put on a bathrobe, sweep the back porch and steps; oats and berries for breakfast, coffee, staring out at the whiteness. The temperature swing goes from fifty at noon to twenty-five at midnight. I cook a pot of beans, pintos, with cracklings, onions and peppers, make a pot of rice, dump my piss-pot and settle in to read. Elmore Leonard or Thomas Perry. Mugs of tea, snacks, drifting off into the middle distance... Aunt Pearl's fried chicken, Sadie's sweet potatoes, Carleen's hush puppies... my extended family put great trust in food. Lazy snowflakes all day. The girls had picked up an electric lap robe at Big Lots and I decided to try it on the lowest setting. It's quite impressive, turning my reading nest into a comfortable place. I started thinking about creature comforts and realized that even a very small Honda generator could power my computer, a seven-and-a-half watt light, and a lap robe. A couple of five-gallon Jerry cans of gas would last for several weeks. My footprint, as it were, is very small.