Flash Floods

Just no place for the water to go. The flood-plain is flooded, the lakes and ponds are full, the new spill-way at Turkey Lake is getting its first real test, Turkey Creek in spate. Rain wakes me again but it's so dark with overcast I roll over and sleep for another hour. When it starts raining harder, I get up and make a full double espresso, put it in my insulated mug, ladle out my measure of cheese grits, settle in to read twenty pages of Thoreau. The radio was playing low, so I could monitor the weather. It's some mild state of emergency, road closures, low-land flooding. High and dry myself, I don't have to go anywhere, so I decided to make cracklings from a smoked jowl, both rotating my stock and providing fat for cooking other things. Cool enough for a fire so I start rendering the diced jowl. At the same time I started caramelizing onions and red peppers in a soup pot to make a dish of mixed greens (turnip, mustard, and spinach) that I wanted to serve on a bed of mashed potatoes. Champ, this is called, ends up being quite a fancy meal, with cracklings and crotons, a topping of cheese, browned on top. To be authentically Irish you need to drink buttermilk with this, but I cut right to the whiskey. A little pumpkin-seed oil, and thou, in the wilderness. Read a long article about impeachment. The word deranged comes to mind. I'm term-limited, we all are, and thank God. Listening to some Senators today I was struck with how they could say nothing. Fucking Beckett novel. Playing yourself in a movie about yourself, that sonorous baritone, the white shirts with starched collars, that brush of breast when the dental assistant is cleaning your teeth.