Baby it's cold outside............

It is very cold here in the sub arctic and the winds are blowing up a 50 per mile hour storm. I hear trees and see a few falling in the woods......So glad we topped our critical dead ones. We still have a lot to clear but no neighbors will be knocking on our doors about trees falling on their land.Power flickering in and out and snow-ice mix are causing a long cold winters night(s). I am worried about my friends who are camping somewhere in all this. C and M if you are reading this please phone home. Ice in your tent does not sound good. Also please let me know if you plan to be coming through here on your way home.

Halo (Angel-Brent) is visiting next week. I am looking forward to his visit. He has been a dear friend for so many years. He is from deep Mississippi and is a "Highlander" by birthright, tartan-kilt and all. His sister lives in the burbs of Detroit and he is flying in and renting a car to see us both. Little does he know Doug has plans for him to be a lumber jack. It seems to be the way Doug bonds with male friends and his brothers(in-law). Howie knows best !!! It is a way of paying for room and board. I am happy the wood stove, once it gathers heat, is keeping our little piglets warm. It truly is amazing how much heat our wood stove puts out after two days of running full steam it is like a sauna in the west side of the house even with garage doors cracked. The east side, well that is another story. I just have to remember to give my stews and dishes more time on the stove to cook. That is how well insulated it is. I had lentil soup on it all day last Sunday and I still had to push it along on the electric stove. Yet the satisfaction of having a pot of food stewing all day on the wood stove would be satisfaction enough. Do you think the food channel would create a show for me to entice people to live and cook semi-off the grid? Put in a good word for me and you might get a baked goose. Speaking of which I, have a stew which has our name it now with neighbors cabbage, Michigan beef and a salad made of neighbors arugula,mizuma greens,my frozen garden peppers, oregano and sage from the garden to spice things up.

For those of you who are reading or who have read "Lacuna"....I am at the portion where he (narrator) is living in Asheville and having his first encounter with the old "mountain dialect" from Madison County, after living in Mexico with Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo. I remember when I first encountered this odd dialect and I was hanging on every word or utterance of vocabulary I could understand. It was not good or bad, nor a judgment, but a realization that we have many dialects in our country which have yet to be fully exposed (not as many as India) enough to make one think while listening to the spoken words in their own "country", so to speak. Remember the movie with Jodie Foster? ("Tay in the waynd?). There are so many people out there living the life of the ones who went before, especially in the mountains of the south. It is hard to imagine there are kids who have never heard of TV. I met a few. In West Va., SC and NC there are many communities separated from modern times by choice and some by ignorance. There are still moon shines and runners and traps in these old hills(thank goodness). Nascar was started in this way.........by moonshine runners. Our friend wrote a book on the history and I was amazed. I sold land in the NC Blue Ridge Mountains(unfortunately now I am looking back) and would come up on all sorts of old(some not so old) stills. Always an interesting find!!!!I had a good relationship with the locals and they would bring us deer meat and watch over me while I gave them privacy and respect. I think that if you are going to drink it you should make it. i actually enjoyed the few tastes I had of moon shine. Now I use store bought "Grain Alcohol" in the making of medicinal and herbal tinctures(like echinacea, golden seal etc.) Us herbalists are shy and weak in constitution by nature. Point is: that if you have the gifts of family recipes....you should use them. In moderation folks !!! No fast driving to the shooting range or the new restaurant, sky diving, disco dancing, deer hunting, open mike at the moose lodge or gallery openings while under the moon shine influence. So I iwll let taht be said and eat and drink in the moon !!!!