Alive

Oh, dear friends, don't give up faith on me.

I am alive. I am intending to keep on writing. I do have plans for those 50 pound bags of beans and rice. I'm just a little slow on the type-up and a little too inundated with practicalities for the fanciful flourishings of words.

But I did get to spend a week working remotely. And while there, I did have moments to craft leftover cornbread into a bread pudding with blueberries and carmalized bananas and a ragout of pork braised in milk and rosemary.*And I did get to send J. off to work in the mornings with some old family favorites: hot cornbread, peanutbutter and jam crepe roll-ups, and omelette sandwiches. I welcomed him home with hot "Irish soup" (potatoes, broccoli and onion). I spent a day simmering a bolognese sauce, and we spent a Friday night rolling out pasta dough and baking a lasagne. We spent Saturday night trying to teach ourselves through trial and error how to make a chicken fried steak.

The fete of these moments is that we did so with very little kitchen equpment. J's suff is still "on the barge" and mine is still in Anchorage. So each of our meals were prepared with only a hunter's knife, a $1.50 dollar skillet, a very flimsy pot**, and a box of plastic spoons.

While there, I attended a local art auction - where an entire table was set out with platters of smoked wild salmon. Free and as much as you could eat. But coffee, cookies and slices of cake cost $1 to $5 each.

I went to a poker tournament among friends at a house that overlooked a wide and open vista of tundra - oh, the tundra at fall is an exceptional feast of colors.

And I doubt that the miracle of watching our road be "plowed" will ever stale. The road is a path of mud. Maybe it was once paved. But now it is a wide, pot-holed swathe of traversible mud. Once a week, a tractor drives down to plow it up. Then it turns around and goes back over it to smooth it down. No more potholes....for at least a day.



* No fresh herbs to be had. And only a few to be had dried.

** "Flimsy" is not an understatement. I would have added to the list of meals a blueberry cornbread crumble, but the pan split as I was pulling it out of the oven. A sad end to a dessert I had looked forward to. But I doubt I will be forgetting anytime soon the mad rush of happiness and laughter as blueberries had to be wiped off every wall and counter space in our little kitchen.