Saturday, December 1, 2012.
The Best Red Beans. Everything's Fine.
Lots of evidence around Manresa of climatic warming. Trees that were red or yellow or brown or even leafless in past years are green this year. My afternoon walk today (up the river two and a half miles to St. Michael's and back) was actually hot. As in eighty degrees. I can't remember a past retreat this warm. And this year's is two weeks later than normal.
The route passed L.A. Poche's perique tobacco operation. Perique is a variety of tobacco much liked in the Middle East and a few other places, but grown nowhere but in Poche's fields. I assumed that the business must be in decline, but clearly it isn't. A big new shed, two or three times the size of the two in front of it, has been added. A chef (can't remember which one) told me he's smoking something over perique tobacco. Hmm.
My thoughts were running free during this and other treks today. Whatever life questions I needed to consider were opened and answered yesterday. The rest of the retreat would be an exercise in free association in a care vacuum. Manresa is that kind of place.
The walk upstream along the Mississippi River began right after lunch. It was my favorite meal from the ladies in Manresa's kitchen. I introduce it this way: "Let's say grace before the best red beans and rice you will eat until this time next year." That always gets a knowing laugh. They really are that good, though. Thin slices of smoked sausage riddle the beans, which have just begun to fall apart.
If there were a downer in the midst of all this sweetness and light, it was that my long hike yesterday gave me a pretty bad blister on my left foot. I will accept that in return for zero aches from my ankle, which is clearly now well. After returning from St. Michael's, I took it pretty easy for the rest of the stay.
Dinner: pork loin, brown rice with mushrooms and brown gravy, corn, black-bottom pie. Someone at another table brought me a glass of ruby port at the end of dinner. I got some of that last night, too. I'll accept it as one of those blessings from heaven we all get sometimes.
