Just Rewards

The devil is in the contents. The moon is large, just on the wane, and quite by accident, the orientation of the house and the location of the windows allows me to see it through almost the complete swing. Reading Thoreau, and he's such an opinionated dandy, the pencil business, living on Emerson's land for free, family dinner on Sunday, and the maid did his laundry, but his absolute love of nature is a wonderful thing. Passion, I think is key, B's reading another biography of Grant, and he gave me a ten minute compressed history that was brilliant. Snow clouds move in, a haze around the sun, and the forecast is for rain (it's 35 degrees) turning to snow tonight, then again tomorrow. Pleased that I followed my own advice and went to town Saturday. I made a nice onion soup, because I needed to use up a bag of onions that were beginning to sprout. The sprouts are fine to eat, I use them like scallions in stir-fry, but I'd thought about onion soup, on toast, with grated cheese, and made a double serving, After an hour tramping around outside, it was very good, with toasted cornbread slathered in butter. A good fire in the stove, this batch of white oak split butts burn like coal, and the house is warm when the cold rains start. And it is a cold rain, almost solid, a nascent ice storm, so I gather my kit within arm's reach of my desk, and settle in with a good book, several good books, actually, stacked in a new pile, but I'm currently reading a history of the potato. There's some light fiction in the pile, Dad's collection of Nero Wolfe novels, some noir crap, a few baseball books. I finish eating the apple pie and think about what I might eat tomorrow. Sausage with peppers and onions on egg noodles. It's supposed to be cold for several days, so I think about starting a soup, or another pot of beans and rice. When the wind starts moaning and the rain has turned to sleet and snow, I close down, wrap in a blanket, and listen to ice pellets hit the metal roof. I have to get up and stoke the stove, just before dawn, and I can see there's a covering of snow. Later, as dawn progresses, the landscape is beautiful. Tree snow in waves. A small amount of green, visible against the white, and I don't know what bush it is. I tie a strip of plastic on one of them, so I can ask B next time he's up. The young leaves haven't been killed by the cold, and there are dozens of other buds in various stages. Evolved for survival. You have to admire that. I made a bean soup, leave it on a trivet, off the heat, to barely simmer all night.