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| bread looks good, but how does it taste?
Photo by J. Harrington
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Meanwhile, we spent part of the morning baking another boule of sourdough bread. We must have been distracted last night while making the dough because, when first "finished," it was much too moist and loose. We thought we had properly weighed each of the ingredients but the results were not what we expected, so we gradually added more flour until the dough came to resemble what we thought it should. We'll see tonight when we taste it and see if it actually baked all the way through. The old baker's advice to "watch the dough, not the clock" should, for at least some of us, start with "Pay attention!" At least today's loaf looks pretty.
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| playing with nymphs
Photo by J. Harrington
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After the bread came out of the oven and was on the cooling rack, we started playing with some new fly-fishing nymphs we received a week or so ago. They're small enough that we ended up buying a pair of bent-nose jewelers pliers to insert and remove them from the foam strips in our fly box. The next time we end up with a touch of cabin fever, we'll take those nymphs out again and flatten the hook barbs. Somehow, over the past decade or so, we've managed to drift away from hitting local streams regularly and now are in the process of rediscovering how much fun we used to have, even in the "off" season, messing with tackle and flies and such. As the temperatures get closer to freezing, instead of sub-zero, we may even take another shot at Winter fly-fishing. We'll see if having wading boots without felt soles helps keep snow from putting us on mini-stilts as we hike toward the water.
Why Regret?
Didn’t you like the way the ants help the peony globes open by eating the glue off? Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable, in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe baloney on white with fluorescent mustard? Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle from the estuary all the way up the river, the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck, the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring? Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old Webster’s New International, perhaps having just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon? What did you imagine lies in wait anyway at the end of a world whose sub-substance is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck? Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren and how little flesh is needed to make a song. Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph split open and the mayfly struggled free and flew and perched and then its own back broke open and the imago, the true adult, somersaulted out and took flight, seeking the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial, alimentary canal come to a stop, a day or hour left to find the desired one? Or when Casanova took up the platter of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff out the window, telling his startled companion, “The perfected lover does not eat.” As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine pinworms as some kind of tiny batons giving cadence to the squeezes and releases around the downward march of debris? Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs what seemed your own inner blazonry flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air? Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy hinged beings, and then their offspring, and then their offspring’s offspring, could navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico, to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree, by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors who fell in this same migration a year ago? Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding hands in our sleep?
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