Chapter 210: Stabilized Distillery and the US Mail

Editor: nnpdad 27 July 2022

Early morning reflections are one of the greatest luxuries in life. While I waited for the wood stove to do its job I climbed back under the covers to watch the fire and reflect. It had been less than a year since I had simply wanted to move to my ranch in Wyoming and to disappear from the face of the earth and the responsibilities associated therewith. Well, I got the disappearing part right; the responsibilities part – well not so much.

Nine months!

I had only been here nine months and so much had happened. Life had been a whirlwind of activity since the first of the year; everything about it had changed. I could have done without the trauma and the fighting, but in the overall of things I was pretty damn happy. In the end I was on a ranch in a really special part of Nebraska and I had good people around me.

It didn’t hurt that I had actual craftsmen around to build things. Had it all been left up to me to build everything it wouldn’t have turned out well. It would have been functional while also being functionally flawed - kind of like that old, reluctant rocker.

I enjoyed the actual work of building things, I always have. Being able to focus on a singular physical process was truly a form of meditation that did wonders for me. Unfortunately for me, I very much lacked the skill to be considered even moderately talented at any particular craft, let alone be classified as a master craftsman.

So when it came to ‘inspecting’ the progress of our new facilities, I was a bit more like a gawking tourist visiting a historical re-enactment attraction than a wizened leader of a productive village. Inspecting facilities was exactly what they had lined up for me again today. With that in mind I rolled out of bed and got busy with my morning.

Coffee in hand, I stepped out the door and into our first taste of the coming winter.

It was just a smattering of snow, maybe a quarter of an inch at best and the flakes still falling from the sky appeared to be the stragglers of our quaint little storm. It would all burn off before noon, the ground still wasn’t frozen and the first hard frost hadn’t come yet. But it would come soon.

I enjoyed the snow flurries while I could; it had been years since snow had come to me rather than me travelling to the snow. I even went so far as to stick out my tongue like a child in a vain attempt to catch a falling flake. I sat down and took a moment to enjoy the oncoming dawn, to do nothing but see, smell and hear. It was a moment to ignore the rest of the world, to simply enjoy the slowly brightening sky and taste my coffee whilst the clouds slowly cleared overhead. The sunrise was breathtakingly beautiful and totally in keeping with the theme of my morning. I treated it as a precious memory etched forever into my soul which could be a moment to remember and reflect upon when life was being unkind.