BBQ chips and Martinis...

A huge high pressure ridge has brought some much needed relief from ninety degree temperatures and humidity that rivales a Turkish hammam.   Arriving home from work  I could tell that this was going to be one of those evenings Thoreau described:

"this is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense"

I decided before even getting out of my truck  that this evening would not escape me. Wanting to experience  every molecule of it I went straight  into the house and grabbed, what seemed at the time, the essentials for an evening campfire/ picnic.  Martinis and kettled cooked potato chips.  Doesn't even sound good at all, I know.  The two are so foreign that they  even feel abrasive  next to each other in a sentence.  But for some reason it just struck me as right, so into the picnic basket they went.  When I walked by Lorrie, who had the day off and was outside painting, I told her that the smaller cooler with ice was inside and that I would meet her over at the cabin in 5 minutes. She smiled and  looked inside the picnic basket I was carrying, expecting to see a bottle of wine or something. What she saw was  Tanqueray, vermouth and potato chips.

With my cache in hand I made my way back to the point. It had been quite a while since we had been over to the cabin. Partly because of the oppressive weather and partly because of life.  So as s I walked along the path through the woods,  I was again reminded of what Thoreau wrote:

"Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine."

Well for this evening I shut the machine down. It is something I need to do more. It is something we all need to do more. It was a cool enough that the fire felt good. A constant north breeze kept the mosquito's at bay and we stayed out late (very late actually), enjoying every last molecule of light. It was indeed a delicious evening.

As for the BBQ chips and Martinis, well...your just gonna have to experience it  yourself sometime, when you too shut down the machine.

:-)