Biscuits & Gravy and the First Killing Frost

Encouraged by the comments from Ellen on my last post..., and of course by Don signing on as a follower..., I am posting this one from last fall. It was originally posted to my Diary on The Agonist (10/12/09). Hope Ellen (and Don) can smell the Biscuits & Gravey this time :)


There are few things in life better than biscuits & gravy on a frosty morning. Especially when it brings to mind fond memories of your recently departed father dishing it up inside a wood stove warmed tent in a hunting camp on Cook Mountain in Idaho many years ago. Yeah…, a little breakfast before the work begins. The fun is over but the thrill isn’t gone until we have saddled the horses and mules and headed back down the draw to pack the downed elk out.

But this morning…, it’s Julie providing the biscuits & gravy here on The Ranch on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. Throw a couple of fresh eggs, provided by the chickens that roam The Ranch, fried to perfection on top, and you feel like you can take on any challenge. The game to harvest later today after this first killing frost isn’t elk though. I haven’t killed any game animal for meat since I left Idaho over twenty years ago. And I hope that I never have too. But will…, if I must. It’s been a few years since the elk have raised havoc with our fences…, but they aren’t far away. The horses and dogs attest to that. The Garden is closer though, and I feel confident that I won’t get the ambiguous feeling from pulling potatoes out of the ground that I did from putting an elk on it. We will see today how successful we have been at coaxing food from this ground we call home. A back up plan to put food on the table in never a bad strategy. In the days to come it may be a necessity to meet the challenges ahead.

I don’t see any back up plan for our nation. We are running on stimulus. We were served up a breakfast of dried biscuits in the form of a busted economic strategy to pull forward demand for housing and credit. Some say we couldn’t have chocked down those biscuits without an outlandish helping of gravy in the form of monetary stimulus. We will never know for sure now. But given the fact that the gravy wasn’t used for it’s initially stated purpose…, and has been spread over the plate to include things like enticing people to buy new cars that they don’t need…, I can’t help but doubt the wisdom of the plan. With real unemployment running around 20% and no real turn around anywhere in sight for the foreseeable future…, we are told we can count on a jobless recovery. The gravy hasn’t helped us choke down those biscuits either. What are we going to do when the gravy runs out?

I am going out to The Garden…, and think about better days and my father.