Yours Truly, A Pyromanaical City Mouse

Here I am in New Orleans again, a far cry from the Amish countryside of Pennsylvania, though NOLA and farm livin' are much closer akin to each other than my parent's hermetically sealed house in the suburbs of DC. Here there are no screens on the windows to keep out the bugs (not that a measly bit of mesh would be any match for the beefy, steroid-laden insects that terrorize New Orleans anyway), and chickens out in the back yard. Heck, gunshots even resounded off the hills in PA – though from deer hunters, not drug dealers – so that was a little piece of home. And the architecture is drafty here, too, though I don't have to light any fires to keep myself warm.

I lit of lot of fires in PA. In the Shack Shack on Cherrymont Farm (see previous post) I became a connoisseur of newsprint. At first I only used the local broadsheets – Morgantown's little weekly, farmer's monthlies, horse rags, whatever came in the mail. Then I cleaned out my car and out came publications from my recent jaunt around the East Coast – alternative press from Key West, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta. My favorite was The Flagpole from Athens, GA: big pages, no staples to hinder my progress, paper supple and easy to manipulate, yet thick and long-burning*. Setting things on fire as a matter of survival rather than entertainment also imbued me with a special reverence for the nightly process.

The Shack Shack during a rare snow this winter.

Yes, it's amazing what happened to my perception of cold out in that drafty little shack. I always disliked winter, even as a child, and have not lived more than a few miles north of I-10 in many years as a result. To be fair, it has been a mild winter, but while walking around in New Orleanian shirt-sleeves last January it would have been hard to fathom sleeping – by choice! – practically outside in 14 degree weather. My little potbellied wood stove was not airtight, so while I could get the shack warmed up relatively quickly, it burned fast and by morning the place would only be a few degrees warmer than the out-of-doors. My mother brought up an electric blanket when she came to visit and it was like magic. Rather than dreading my inevitable extraction from underneath three comforters in the chilly mornings, the electric blanket bought me a couple of minutes of warm extremities, long enough to throw on my jeans, boots and coat and gather up clean clothes for a warm bath in the main house.

And now I'm back in 75-degree weather, gearing up for Mardi Gras and my bicycle tour. Having finished the first draft of my novel before vacating Cherrymont, the fire burns bright inside me.

*A Kindle ≠ kindling, it just smells really bad when you set it on fire. Yet another argument for hard copies.