dark basement musings

It's early dawn. Last night’s fire threatened to cool around 2 a.m. With images of waking up with a cold nose and the desire to dawdle under the covers until the sun warmed my room (that would be April), after flushing the toilet I opened the stove door and stirred the embers. I fed it a couple of tasty mortals, to tease it to wakefulness. Then I hunkered down under the covers again with a good book, to see if it would take the bait. Absorbed in Aunt Ophelia’s terrible discovery of the reality of slaving, a half hour passed quickly without even a word from Uncle Tom. Nor did I hear the comforting cackle of an awakening fire. Nevermind, sweet Eva was just making the acquaintance of the new slave girl bought from the monsters at the tavern; I wasn’t ready to turn the light off yet.

It took a few more pokes, and inevitably the old fallback ploy of a sheet of newspaper thrown over the embers before the fire finally decided to awaken. It was an hour pleasantly spent, nevertheless. With the roar of it comforting my ears at last, I shut down the draft and tamped down the damper, and let my eyelids pull me back into the dark of slumber.

The book, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" begins in Kentucky, and takes us back there often. And so that is where I went in my dreams. I visited my old friend David, whose tall lanky frame and loose bones fits the description of a number of characters in the book. I think in fact David’s grandfather was actually born in Ohio, not a slave owner of the 19th century, but nevermind, it was my dream and it was sweet.

On my nightstand I have a silly little frail thing of a clock. When I push down on it, it speaks the time and temperature. As the first light of dawn crept through the window, I nudged the clock and found the room temperature had risen to a tolerable 68 degrees. My taste buds stirred up the image of coffee; my limbs responded. Disentangling from the layers of blankets married to the sheet, I swung my feet to the floor and into the slippers in one smooth move. The water was on to boil almost before the jeans were on my legs. What despots, those taste buds!

And so begins another late autumn day in Vermont. One of the last, maybe a handful left, of leisure days before work at the ski resort begins in earnest. Come next week, the pleasant dawn footfalls on the ceiling above me that now serve to remind me that this gypsy woman is, for a frail moment in time, sheltered in the bosom of the family will actually serve the very practical purpose of a wake-up call to the start of a work day.