Forcing It

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

-Lao Tzu

Distracted this morning with the news of the hurricane, which as of the 5 a.m. update appears poised to hit Wyldswood rather than Panama City. We know these things we would rather not have experienced, that there's a 5 a.m. update from the NHC, that tracks have a way of shifting although this one appears pretty solid and the models seem to have rapidly converged.

Worried about our geese, Gus and Other Gus. Worried about the grand old oak that has been our companion in the yard all these years now. Will I arrive there this weekend to no attack geese, to a pile of broken lumber where our tree once stood?

And how will I get there, exactly? My plan had been to fly to ECP on Wednesday morning, but now they're calling for potential 30-40 mile-an-hour winds by that afternoon. I've landed in that before, but I was flying a fourteen ton jet with afterburners at the time. This Columbia is like a darned kite.

It's been a busy weekend.

Friday evening we hosted an extended happy hour with our new friend Ruth, a college professor from Florida who's living in the old Corning Free Academy apartments behind us. I was tasked with firing up the smoker, and cooked both pork ribs and beef short ribs because Ruth's Jewish and we didn't want to be bad hosts. It turned out she's not an observant Jew, and enjoyed both piles of ribs with us as we stood around the kitchen island, drank wine, and told stories until too late into the evening.

Saturday, I figured out much later, marked my twenty-fifth anniversary as a lawyer licensed in the state of Florida. The mixed feelings that came with that realization get their own essay one day, but for now I think it speaks for itself that I forgot all about it when the day arrived. Instead we started the weekend by attending the Heritage Festival at the Heritage Village of the Southern Finger Lakes. We were blessed with a crisp fall day to enjoy viewing a joiner building buckets, baby goats begging to be stroked, and Peg's personal favorite, the 18th century garden and barn filled with old farm implements and folks there to explain how the first settlers hacked out a living here 240 years ago.

Inside the old Benjamin Patterson Inn one of the beams bore witness to this place's Hurricane Michael moment, the disastrous flood of 1972.

Around the corner we met a couple geeky ghost hunters from the local paranormal society, the implements of their avocation lined up on a table in front of them like so much salvage from a Radio Shack in 1973. We struck up a conversation with them about the spooks who live here with us at Tara, and they assured us that all we'd experienced--cats gazing at space, cold spots on the floor, figures passing behind us when we're at the mirror, a sense of a "presence" in the room--were classic signs of a haunting. Who knows? It's all sort of fun. Maybe we'll join these ghostbusters when the lead a ghost hunt through the Heritage Village next month.

Mostly we found ourselves wishing the girls were with us, figuring they would've loved all the crafts and interactive history and animals. Maybe next year, before they become too old and too cool for all that.

Returning home we tackled the challenge of taming our disastrous yard. For most of the summer, we've coped with my absence by hiring perhaps the worst and most expensive yard crew ever to tail a mower. They stopped coming for no apparent reason a few weeks ago, and the place is a mess, the disaster magnified by the fact that our oak out front went mad and started dropping acorns in a volume found nowhere else up here on the hill.

On the upside, it's drawn every squirrel in Steuben County to share in our surfeit of nuts. Even a black squirrel.

The work was arduous, with P blasting leaves and acorns into the street with our new leaf blower, a mandatory piece of equipment here in the Southern Tier that will become a snow blower in a few weeks, while I raked and mowed and edged. Finally we finished, the yard was lovely once again, and after watching five minutes of the Tennessee-Florida game we hopped into the convertible for a lovely fall drive to Watkins Glen for drinks and dinner with one of my Eagle Driver buddies and his lovely bride, who drove down to meet us from Dresden.

Bill and Peggy are an interesting couple--you don't meet many MIT graduates in the Eagle community, and both are extremely bright, well-read, and engaged even in retirement. Neither couple would choose Watkins Glen as a meeting place, with its tourist trap watering holes and ice cream stands (of course--it's New York), but it happens to lie halfway between their lake house on Seneca and Tara. So we gathered for a drink on the porch, watching the traffic flow past as I sipped on my $52 (!) double Weller, then stood in line for a long, leisurely Thai supper spent solving the world's problems.

Sunday morning's frustrations led to the title of this little ramble. I'd mentioned at some point that the cool weather that arrived a few days ago made a perfect backdrop to make a big pot of chile colorado; and besides, Issac has announced he and Olivia are almost out of the red pepper flakes that are a byproduct of that lengthy process, so we need to get at it.

So after clearing the table of breakfast dishes, P reminded me it was time to cook. First we inventoried the chiles in our cupboard, and realized we were low on the varieties that made red chile what it is. Then we were reminded we'd never cooked red chile here, and lacked even a basic food processor. It was already mid-morning, and this is an all-day cooking exercise, so we rushed out in the rain to Wal-Mart, Peg's least favorite shopping establishment, in search of both.

The box store provided some stew meat, and a food processor Peg immediately declared inadequate although it was the only one they had that even came close to meeting our culinary needs. A food processor should cost $250, she announced--this $85 model is sure to disappoint.

Perhaps.

Then we drove another few rainy blocks to Aldi's looking for dried red chiles. Nada.

Finally we gave up and drove to Wegman's, always the best but rather pricey, paid $33 for a few tiny bags of peppers, and dashed back to the house to throw something together before we had to leave for our afternoon agenda of fun.

I stuffed a spaghetti pot with cascabels, guajillos, anchos, and pasilllas, and was about to fill the pot with water to boil down and rehydrate the pods, when P announced we lacked a strainer. Oh yeah. We've never made chile here before. And the prior owner left us lots of groovy kitchen implements, but no strainer and pestle.

At that point I stepped back and took stock of the moment. I'd felt out-of-sorts all morning, rushing from store-to-store to kitchen, always glancing at my watch and wondering if we'd pull something together in time as we found one element missing, then another, then another. The universe was talking to us, telling us to stand up the throttles and feel the flow we'd lost by trying to cram too much into our weekend.

So we gave up on red chile, ordered all the stuff we needed on Amazon for the next time, and made a pitcher of vinho verde sangria full of cucumber slices, melon balls, grapes, basil, and of course Portuguese green wine, and set about drinking it as we laughed together at our doomed quest for chile.

But we didn't laugh for long, because the universe soon reminded us that I'd impulsively bought two very expensive tickets to see Little Feat that afternoon up at an event venue situated on a winery beside Keuka Lake.

I've written about Little Feat before, how their music provided the soundtrack for much of my time as a Southern sojourner biding my time in California. The serendipity of discovering their concert on a lake forty minutes from here compelled us to purchase tickets and attend what was almost a bucket list concert for me.

We drove through spectacular farm country up to Keuka, leaves just starting to turn. The venue itself sat on a bluff overlooking the lake, one of the most beautiful settings for a concert I've ever seen.

The only way to make it more beautiful is by adding a little Peg to the shot.

The concert venue was a "barn" built specifically for hosting live events, with a giant fireplace, rolling garage doors to open or close certain spaces, and vendors selling all manner of food and drink.

We don't drink New York wine, never really developed a taste for it, but when in Rome . . .

Eventually we drank enough of the stuff that we bumbled into the t-shirt stand for souvenirs.

My AmEx really should have one of those breathalizer things, like an alcoholic has on his dashboard after his third DUI. When am I ever going to wear a "Weed Whites [and] Wine" t-shirt, echoing a lyric from one of Little Feat's most well-known songs? I'm going to get strange looks at the gym.

The music certainly didn't disappoint. The opening act was Miko Marks, a vivacious black woman we pegged as a Southerner but who's actually from Flint, Michigan. Between shows we struck up a conversation with her out at the booth where she was autographing CDs (there goes that AmEx again). She's playing the Grand Ole Opry in a couple weeks, and is obviously giddy as her star takes off.

And to my amazement, almost all of the original Little Feat took the stage when it was their turn to play, most of them in their mid-70s and jamming like they were thirty for well over two hours. Most but not all of us in the crowd were Q-tips, oldsters reconnecting with a part of our youths, singing along with gusto to "Oh Atlanta" and "Dixie Chicken", one crazy uninhibited lady dancing with herself continuously for the entire show. It was all I could do to keep P from joining her. We were definitely in the flow now, not forcing anything, swaying to sounds that have remained a part of our lives all these years. It was magic, pure magic.

But now to pay for all of that--my queue of writing projects requires that I knock out one a day, some of these large enough that I'd normally spend several days thinking, drafting, and revising, but there's no time for that now. I have deadlines to meet, and there's a storm in the Gulf.