My First Grease Fire

While I'm still enamored with my new blog, I decided I might as well take advantage of that fact.

I have a gas stove. I have a nice big, round skillet pan. The problem is that it is so large in diameter that, when centered over the burner, it gets very hot in the middle, and the middle of the pan is becoming brownish and overused. I noticed that the pan is actually wide enough to span two burners, though barely wide enough to cover both flames. I thought I'd try a little experiment.

With the pan spread across two burners, the bacon was cooking nicely, and the heat seemed to be distributed evenly. I'm so smart. Wow, that bacon sure is sizzly. Poof — an orange flame leapt into the pan and started dancing around. My first instinct, of course, was to move the pan away from the burners, which was enough air motion to extinguish the flame. It lasted all of about three seconds, and everything turned out mighty tasty.

So, the lesson is, when cooking bacon on a gas stove using one skillet spanning two burners, keep the sizzly bacon away from the edge of the pan.

Christmas

Christmas has always been a day with a very pensive undercurrent for me. Whenever the day begins to slow down, usually in the afternoon, thoughts swell in the deep of the holiday and push to the surface. This feeling is amplified as it echoes through the empty streets, and it seems to resonate through the restlessness of pets left outside and birds in the woods.

This pensive wave lifts me and takes me into the streets I've plodded through since early childhood. The many similarities between the neighborhood then and now push the differences into relief: Trees were much shorter and could be easily climbed; houses have had additions made, or have had siding added; there is new pavement, or new cracks in the old pavement.

And then there is the forbidden area behind Scottfield, toward which my pensive walks frequently lead. I make may way down to the end of Dougfield, turn right onto Broadfield, and look left, through a wide area between two houses. The thorns and weeds have overgrown the entry point, but they are sufficiently trampled to allow passage into a mini wasteland that stretches to the edge of I-95. It is the domain of high-tension electrical wires, ATVs, random vegetation, and an ever-encroaching industrial park.

In my leather shoes, jeans, and clean jacket, I step carefully through the growth, moving parallel to a gulley that is fed by the street drains of Scottfield. Down an eroded bank, over a dirty rivulet, and back up, a little further, down and up again, and I survey the desolation that was once my favorite childhood getaway. Dirt has replaced most of the grass and random vegetation. Pond-like puddles and half-melted icy mud stretch across the scene. The tracks of the ATVs are everywhere, giving the appearance of intention to piles of trash (car bodies, water heaters, unrecognizables) strewn about. A chunk of worn wood pokes through the sandy soil near my feet, the last holdout of railroad tracks that crossed this spot 20-plus years ago. High-tension wire poles, once pristine, now rusty, stand silently, as if their presence is merely a formality. In front of me is a depression in which water from the gulley pools on its way to nowhere. Some of the kids used to swim in it, and they would always find pollywogs and tadpoles there in the summer. The water today is the color of rust.

As I explore, slipping now and then on mud that appears as solid ground, I imagine the transformation of this space in time-lapse. Watching it pass from green and wild to used and wasted, my sense of loss is tinged with resignation. Who will remember this? Even my own memories are disintegrating. There's no way back. My thoughts turn inward, and my own life spreads across the mini-wilderness as an overlay. Occasionally, I think I could return to the inherent optimism and simple beliefs of childhood. But doing that would be a step into the mud. Things seen cannot be unseen. Things done cannot be undone. Random childhood exploration must become intentional adult trailblazing. Some things must be destroyed in order to make something new.

So, where to from here? What can I make out of this wasteland life? Honestly, I'm not sure. Hopefully something that won't be forgotten. Perhaps it will even be a place where children come and play.