Looking out my backdoor: An honest love

Every day brings its own. Its own what? I can give that sentence a thousand different objects. It’s more fun to leave it open. Use your imagination.

Last night brought rain. I love lying in bed listening to the rainfall ping on the roof, plop on the potted palm outside my bedroom window. Rain thuds on the thick, waxy avocado leaves, barely makes a sound on the oleander.

Rain, heavenly rain. Finally rain comes to us, not a lot, not with sturm and drang, but rain comes, lovely steady, straight-down soaking rain. I stand out in the rain, raise my face and can almost feel my leaves grow. I speak metaphorically, in love with rain.

It’s an honest love, bred in the bone, handed down to me from generations of toilers of the soil.

Through my open windows last night while it rained, I could smell the flowering trees, the wet grass, the magnolia that I thought had died but was resuscitated by the rains, the dirt, the damp. Ah, love.

Frequently in the night I hear my gecko. I say mine, but only because it managed to get into my house and make its home. There is plenty of food, ants, spiders, house centipedes. A gecko in the home is a treasure. Welcome home.

Another newcomer to my world is the tree frog in the avocado. The first two nights, I thought its purpose must be to keep me awake. This is a noisy critter, all night long, noisy. At first an irritant, now that I’m used to its voice, blending with all the usual night sounds, the tree frog is a delight.

That’s the magical, romantic, dreamy part of my day. Then there is work.

Each day brings its own work, even though I am retired and have no specific schedule to follow. Each day brings a different work, often unexpected.

For years I’ve used sea salt for cooking, for seasoning my food. I like Celtic sea salt, the kind of sea salt that looks dirty. I prefer its flavor. To me, it does the best job of enhancing other flavors.

I’ve not found any tienda that sells it here and it seems that Mexico doesn’t allow it to be shipped in. I’ve tried. So when I run out of salt I’ve brought with me, I buy Pacific sea salt, which isn’t treated to stay dry.

Salt attracts moisture. Even in my glass, air-tight containers, my salt is damp.

My friend Kathy just returned from France, a walking tour and long visit with her daughter. She brought me a pound of dirty sea salt, sopping wet.

Finally, turtle-slow as I am to seek a solution, I searched for ways to dry the sea salt without damaging the mineral content. Should you ever run into this problem, it’s easy. Spread the salt on parchment paper and place it in a really low oven, 10 minutes. Two rounds in the oven have dried my salt quite nicely and quite clumpily. I have a small mortar and pestle and after grinding away at the salt what seemed an inordinate amount of time, I ground out the clumps.

I filled my salt shaker, along with a spoonful of rice grains. Everybody knows rice will keep the salt in the shaker dry. I stored the rest of my newly dried salt in an air-tight glass container.

I do wonder about myself, about why I am content to deal with, to live with, to make do with things like wet salt until one day, for no observable reason, I decide to seek a way to make it better.

I still have a jar of wet salt. I only dried enough to use in the next couple months. I know if I were to dry all my salt, it is still untreated salt. Salt gathers moisture.

Meanwhile a cloud bank is building up in the northeast and another is rolling over the mountains to the west. Along with the scent of freshly mown grass, I smell rain a coming.

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Sondra Ashton grew up in Harlem but spent most of her adult life out of state. She returned to see the Hi-Line with a perspective of delight. After several years back in Harlem, Ashton is seeking new experiences in Etzatlan, Mexico. Once a Montanan, always. Read Ashton’s essays and other work at http://montanatumbleweed.blogspot.com/. Email [email protected].