Slow Cooking Saturday Night

The Hammer cannot tell the difference between the days I go sawmilling and days I have other shit to do. If I am not awake by the time my clock awakes me most days with its chainsaw like roar she molests me with her cold as a chainsaw in the morning nose. Good thing I am a morning man.

When it is raining this hard my Animal Sacrificing neighbours cannot help but get excited about the the Second Coming of Jesus Motherfucking Christ knocking on their multiply-bolted door to take them to the Tennessee Saturday night of Heaven and send Atheist Assholes like me to join all their crooked preachers in Hell the Hammer does not even go out onto the grass to water her horse. She just lays there by the door until I let her back in for breakfast. And if Sonja gets up to let her out she just jumps back into her bed and pretends she is still sleeping. My dog, like me, likes to be woken up by Beer.

I got out of bed, thankful to the workers who fought for a man's right to not have to work every day but the one where they praised the motherfucking Lord, looked at the coffee maker on the cluttered countertop, looked in the fridge and took out a beer. There was a time a long, long time ago, when Sonja would have asked me, "What the fuck are you doing having a beer at 5:30 in the morning?" Over the years my answer back of, "I'm out of fucking coke," has made more and more sense to her as the list of people we have known to varying degrees who have died from drugs stronger than beer has lengthened like the line-ups outside the Salvation Army at lunch time.

As I slowly adjusted to the cold light of day I prepared spaghetti sauce in the slow cooker. I do love smelling home cooking when I get home from a walk in the rain.

After I had some banana pancakes and another beer I took the Hammer out for her walk in the splish-splash mountains that keep watch on the good people of Steepleton. As we approached the cloud licked mountains they looked like a range rising from the smoky depths of an Amphibian Hell. Then the clouds descended and hid all but the mountains' liquid bases.

I have never seen a world so wet and ready to explode. Blades of grass shorter than a voter's memory poke their green hopefulness through the inescapable muddy puddliness. Skunk cabbage leaves, usually the deep green of cheap jade, are pale from the lack of sun as the expensive jade rockhounds dream of digging up. Mushrooms of all kinds lap up the wet rot. I cannot recall seeing magic mushrooms growing in the spring, certainly never in such numbers. I picked a pile of them and stored them away in one of the Hammer's big plastic shit bags.

Waterfalls where I have never seen waterfalls loudly crashed from every mossy overhang. Below the waterfalls water sprang from the earth from underwater rivers freshly dug. Water is like rats - you cannot stop it. It crossed my mind the Hammer and I could be buried by a landslide. White tail hawks skreeked as they searched the ground for drowned rats. A bald eagle not yet old enough to have a white crown slowed above a sloshy hemlock. Its wings spread wide enough to block the feeble light of the sun as it settled its heavy, wet body on an elastic branch.

I was happier than ever to return to my warm, dry home. As Sonja bathed our muddy dog I emptied the fresh mushrooms into the slow cooking spaghetti sauce. It was going to take more than cold beer to put a shine on this spring day.

A couple hours after dinner and after a couple glasses of B3 I was on my way out the door when I looked up and yelled at Sonja to, "Look out the fucking window!" "Right fucking on!" she yelled back. There in the Satan's black bathwater sky curved the brightest rainbow you ever saw. Tomorrow motorcycles will fill our quiet valley with noise and laughter will erupt on the smoky patios of coffee shops and bars. See you there, in the sun splashed bar, motherfuckers.