Maybe I should shovel

Although the hefty batch we got just before Christmas was all the snow I needed this winter, today’s is at least picturesque, without the dubious promise of 2 feet lingering on the ground for weeks on end. No, it should be well and completely dispatched by Tuesday, so today--a Saturday--I’m not minding it. In fact, I’ll pop a log or two in and sit facing the fireplace once Gabe has ended his marathon shower, and I’m certain the exhaust fan is off. What I don’t want to do, when it’s 17〫F outside, is suck smoke into the house and have to open windows.

Jeff wants coffee. He pulls a random bag of rock-hard beans out of the freezer and waves it at me. “Do we have something high-test to use?” he inquires. I take the frozen bag and put it back, then make him a 4-cup pot. It’s not that I’m trying to make the coffee-making procedure arcane but, even at its simplest, it’s got too many steps for Jeff. At the moment we have a freezer shelf well-stocked with various bags of ground fair-trade beans, brought back by Katherine from her last business trip to Central America. So, my usual protocol--mix equal parts caffeinated and decaf, store in ziplocs, grind just before brewing--has been temporarily disrupted to allow for grinding the decaf, then mixing with the El Salvadoran, or Panamanian, or Mexican pre-ground, and pushing “go.”

The fire has started, its cooperation finessed by use of a mini java-log starter, and now I suspect that the Estonian timber will not last long. The bread machine is rattling along through its first knead cycle in the kitchen, and the dog is gazing dolefully out the front window, wishing someone would take her out to play “Balto.” Perhaps this afternoon, mukluks strapped in place, I will.

The next chapter of my story awaits, ready for me to fill in the details of a new setting. It’s a tower, at the top of which lives and works a wealthy eccentric...but the devil--as they say--is in the details, and Clarence my muse seems reluctant to take him on.

Gabe is proposing Candid Camera-style scenarios. “What if a family is in the kitchen, and a person they don’t know walks down the stairs, and casually asks if they have any milk?” I’m supposed to have a good answer to this sort of question. I wonder about Gabe’s roommate for next year. Will he dig a discussion about the relative merits of being able to control dust with your mind versus having the power to enlist the assistance of every lightning bug in the vicinity? Meanwhile, Gabe has selected a phase B plan--he’ll ask for deferred admission to a school in North Carolina which has accepted him. Then, after a preparatory year in Connecticut, he can stay or transfer. There are hurdles--for instance, I still have to take him driving until I get him licensed--but I feel, at least, like I’m clearing them, one at a time, without too many skinned knees.