Last Thursday’s dinner option got reduced down to something quick yet again, and I had been unable to shake a mental fascination with a toasted bacon sandwich in all its small-plate simplicity. The chile-rubbed bacon that I recently discovered also has proven tough to shake and that’s the route I chose yet again.
The co-incidence of Juneteenth and the final official day of spring offered up a dish of stormy intensity just as dinnertime approached. A couple of flickers of the lights without a loss of power allowed dinner to hit the table on schedule nonetheless, but many other parts of the city were not so fortunate. Above is a photo from just up the street, where a tree has caused a power pole to crack but still hang taut on the tension of the lines.
But our neighbors a few streets over on Poplar were not quite so lucky: the huge limbs that came crashing down took out power lines.
That also was the case at the intersection of Glade and Clover just down from the house, in the West End neighborhood.
A couple of lanes of Marshall Street were blocked by the portion of a large tree across from the Benton Convention Center:
Here on our happy quarter acre, it was instead a ton of tiny branches mostly, and a few larger limbs that were easy to manage. The trash cans blew around, and a shingle or two landed on the driveway, and there was more washing of the soil in The Grove and along the line of azaleas on the south side of the driveway.
Once the rains stopped, I donned gloves and work boots and did as much cleanup as I could in the evening dusk light. Since that Thursday was a holiday, I was glad that the yard cart pickup occurred the following morning, since I’d stuffed it full of all that detritus.
This shingle above was flung from the roof with such force that it put a huge scrape on the trunk lid of my old Volkswagen CC. Better that than my new car, of course!
"Chile-Rubbed Bacon," by Rick Martinez. In "D.I.Y. B.L.T. O.M.G.: Bake Better Bacon (Upgrade Idea No. 1)," Bon Appétit, July 2016, p. 44.
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