Lost & found

What are weekends for, if not to clean the kitchen, make French-press coffee instead of Mr. Coffee, sweep the back room, scoop the ashes from the stove, bury them under the snow, and turn a few heliotropic plants to face in instead of out? But this is no ordinary weekend.

It snowed again, but it only took a few minutes with my trusty shovel to clear off the back walk once I had secured the broken handle with a long nail and some electrical tape. That and other chores left enough time to start a batch of bread, and by the time the dough was ready to knead and rise again, it was time for the drum circle at the rec center.

They say things can either go very well or very badly in the Year of the Iron Tiger. What elemental forces are at work in the natural world and in human society? I did a reading for the incoming lunar new year, and the Book of Changes, in a new translation by Alfred Huang, was as cryptic as ever. Whether 'splitting apart' like firewood, or 'peeling off' like a banana, or 'falling away' like the husk of a seed, the imagery still gives me something very abstruse to work with. Something solid is eroding, but seeds will sprout and push against tough resistance. Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

I got to the drum circle late, as usual, and once I settled in, time passed all too quickly. Rhythm is not the same as time management. Ten or twelve drummers fed off each other's energy in 20-minute jams that just kept going, and a few steady hands knew when to bring it down to a close.

On the way home I stopped at the flower shop at Schrock and State and bought flowers for the three women in my life - my mother, my wife, and my daughter - and went home to knead the bread and build a fire. It isn't easy choosing just the right gift for someone important, someone with certain likes and dislikes, someone who sees everything as a symbol of something. It keeps it interesting. Then it's reassuring to do something you know how to do, something immediate and tangible.

While picking up an armload of firewood, I found my lost glasses under a big piece of split maple and put them in my pocket, possibly the same pocket they fell out of when I bent over while stacking wood back in October. Somehow I knew they would be there, it just took a while to use up that much wood. While the fire warmed up the den, I sat at my desk and bent the twisted right rim back into a shape that would hold the lens that popped out, cleaned the lenses, adjusted the nose pieces to sit on the bridge of my formidable nose, and put them on. They still fit better than the backup pair I've been using these past four months.

Now what? Plans A and B just didn't seem right, so we went to Cafe Istanbul for lamb with rice and okra, Turkish wine, and coffee. Yes, I think that's what weekends are for.