Various Veins
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We had some mashed potatoes left from supper, scooped them into a plastic container and stored them in the refrigerator. The next day Martha chopped some onion and stirred it with a splash of milk into the potatoes. She molded them into cakes, patties, whatever you call them, and browned them in a frying pan.
Suddenly, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, I was back in time. The house was lighted by oil lamps. Food was cooked on a wood or coal combination kitchen range. There were potato patties browning in a cast iron skillet, to be part of breakfast.
It was winter, so a steaming pot of oatmeal would be served drenched in milk and crusted with brown sugar ahead of the potatoes, bacon, eggs, boiled or poached, fried bacon and a stack of toast, peanut butter and jam, hot coffee.
A stove lid would be removed and the bread laid four slices at a time in a wire gadget, someone standing ready to flip it over when one side was a golden brown.
Why such a hungry man's breakfast? In those days there were cows to be fed and milked, horses to be fed, hogs to be slopped before breakfast. Mom and dad did theses chores while Grandma Bowes got breakfast started.
It was common to have snow as deep as fell here a couple of weeks ago. Dad would scoop a path to the barn through banks almost higher than my head.
Water for the livestock was stored in a concrete tank in the barnyard. The first chore was to kindle a fire in a cast iron heater that sat in the middle of the tank, draft air drawn down a passage that ended level with the stove top. A stove pipe stuck up through a piece of galvanized metal nailed to the wooden cover over the tank. By the time breakfast was over the ice would be thawed so the beasts could enjoy a warm drink.
Takes lots of water to produce milk.
In the recent storm, workers who drove into London were in their offices early. City dwellers were late, angry because the streets and parking lots weren't plowed. Their all-season radials wouldn't push through the snow like regular winter tires. All-season tires don't stop a vehicle in the same distance snow tires do. The difference is enough to cause a fatal collision.
When on Friday news broke of a meteoroid exploding over central Russia, another memory was triggered.
Mom told us, probably during one of those stormy winter nights, of walking from Eden to her home next to the cemetery on the Ridge Road. Suddenly the night sky was bright as day. Unlike the atomic bomb sort of noise and shock waves in Russia, this phenomenon was eerily silent. I've always wondered if it was when a meteoroid flattened miles of forest in Kamchatka.
Astronomers tell us it was mere chance that an asteroid blazed by the Earth over the Indian Ocean, missing satellites in stationary orbit as it passed, on the same day as exploding rock shattered walls and windows in Russia. They also say lots of meteoroids land on Earth. Most land in the seas or areas where no one sees them.
Comforting news.
Where did the asteroid go after it passed Earth?
Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called "The End of the World News" about a planet that just missed Earth. Everybody sighed with relief. Everybody except the astronomers. They decided not to let the media know the stray was orbiting the sun and would be on collision course when it came back.
Now excuse me, I've got one patty left in the fridge. I'm going to rechauffe it for a snack.