My Coffee Maker has Gone Soft

The coffee maker at my cabin is unusual.  For starters, it is white in color.   Additionally, this coffee maker lacks a hot plate.  Instead of using a hot plate to keep the coffee warm, the carafe is also white and well insulated.

Back to that in a bit.

Upon waking in the mountain darkness this morning, I wobbled out from my bedroom to start coffee brewing.  I rubbed at my eyes the whole time.   As always, I prepped everything last night so a simple press of the on/off button would begin the brewing process.

I had in mind I might go back to bed and wait until the coffee finished before assaulting my day.

When I reached the rolling island upon which the coffee maker presently stands, I reached out in the darkness and tried to tap the coffee maker's onboard switch.

What the…?

Overnight, my coffee maker had gone soft!  Pillow soft.  Soft as a marshmallow.

I poked at it twice.

For an instant a kind of righteous fear gripped me.  Had I finally fallen into an alternate universe as I suspected I someday would?  Did solid now have a new definition?

I strained my eyes to see the coffee maker.  Two white objects stood there side by side.

A double universe then?

I quickly backtracked to a bank of light switches and flicked on all three of them.

A wash of light fell across everything.

Ahhhh.

My bad.

I was trying to switch on an upright roll of paper towels.

—Mitchell Hegman

Summer Rainstorm

Look at us now.  Battered by squalls we stand rigid in our valley.  Clouds tumble black over tourmaline above us.  The highest mountains have crawled away from around us, surely they have, and rain drives hard into this summer’s ginger grasses.  The once open and rolling expanse now obscured by curtains of rain.  But the reward, the reward for this sparsely peopled land, once the storm recedes, will be the prancing green of freshened sage, the newest bird chanting, and pine and stone mountains gathering us up once again.

—Mitchell Hegman

From a Distance

From a distance, sorrow appears as a disheveled old man parting tall weeds to find a dog he lost many years ago.  But as you get nearer, you find a younger man dancing with the ghost of a young woman.

—Mitchell Hegman

Scenes from a Mountain

Posted today are a few photographs from a day spent climbing a very steep mountainside.

The Bottom

The Steep

The Berries

—Mitchell Hegman

Bucket List for 2019

1. Make friends with the chipmunk constantly flinging itself across the deck at my cabin.

2. Teach the rest of the world to spell nooodles with an extra “o” just for fun.

3. Invent a scented spray that, when misted across loud and blustering people, turns them into a potted begonia plants with pink plastic bells dangling from the stem of each leaf.

4. Find a dime and a couple quarters in the cushions of my sofa (the same way I did as a kid).

5. Clean under my refrigerator.

6. Travel to Plains, Montana again.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Great Gig the Sky

Though most of you have probably not heard the name Clare Torry, you have likely heard her voice.  Clare, was a songwriter and session vocalist during the 1970s.  She sometimes worked at Abby Road Studios.

Back in 1973, the progressive rock band Pink Floyd recorded songs in Abby Road Studios.  One of the songs they recorded grew from a chord progression played by keyboardist Richard Wright.  The progression was known as “The Mortality Sequence” or was sometimes called “The Religion Song.”  

In the year previous, the song had been performed live as an organ instrumental accompanied by spoken word samples from the Bible.  A change in the song’s tittle and a switch from organ to piano landed the song on the recording playlist for the album The Dark Side of the Moon.  After attempts at layering recordings of various sound effects overtop the music—including recordings of NASA astronauts—the dissatisfied band suggested having a female singer simply “wail” overtop the track.

Album sound engineer Alan Parsons suggested, as you might now imagine, a young woman named Clare Torry might be a perfect choice for her voice.

Clare was brought into the studio.  The band played the instrumental track for her and then asked her extemporize vocals for it.  Clare found herself somewhat flustered at first.  With no lyrics to sing, she lacked a proper path.

After some false starts and a little thought, Clare decided she would simply use her voice as if it were another instrument lending itself to the track.  She performed two full takes, and then stopped halfway through a third, convinced she had done the best she could on the second cut.

Though the members of Pink Floyd were very pleased with what she had done, she left the studio thinking her work would end up rejected in the final cut.

The song, with her vocals included, is one of my favorites of all time.  I have listened to this song countless times.  Clare Torry’s voice slices into my very soul at points.

Posted below is a video recording of “The Great Gig in the Sky,” the song Clare lent her voice to in 1973.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVBCE3gaNxc

Aster and Fairy Bells

Arctic Aster

Posted today are a couple photographs of flowers I captured on an afternoon walk near my cabin.  I am certain the first flower is an aster.  In looking through all of my books on flowers and searching online, I think the flower is, specifically, an Arctic aster.

The Arctic aster ranges from the Yukon in the north down to Colorado.  This plant is willing to grow in dry and rocky soils.

Some tribes used the roots, stems, and flower to produce a tea for the treatment of backaches.  The tea was taken while sitting in a steam bath.

Rough-Fruited Fairy Bells

A member of the lily family, rough-fruited fairy bells enjoy a wide range.  In the western half of North America, they flourish from British Columbia down to Arizona and New Mexico.  They favor rich, moist soils in forested areas. 

Rough-fruited fairy bells blossom and produce their berries in pairs.  The fruit, though (in my mind) suspiciously colored, are edible and said to be bland to mildly sweet.

I have not yet tasted one of the berries.

The Blackfoot people used the berries to treat snow-blindness.  They did this by inserting the seeds from plant under the eyelids for the night.

—Mitchell Hegman