Friday, July 23, 2021

Three Beautiful Things 07/22/2021: Road Trip to Burke, Celebrating Betty Moore's Life, Farro Green Salad

 1. Ed swung by this morning around 8:30, having invited me to join him on a drive to the once booming, now dilapidated old mining town of Burke. The company Ed retired from is in the midst of a huge repository building project up that canyon and Ed wanted to check out their progress. We drove close to the site and Buff saw Ed's pickup and gave him the green light to come to where he was, doing some supervision from his pickup. We did and Ed learned all about who's running what machines and trucks on the job and how this big job is progressing. 

We meandered on up the canyon a ways and Ed spotted his cousin so we went up Julie's driveway and Ed and she yakked for a while. 

It was fun to get out and see a little piece of Shoshone County and it's always fun to yak and laugh and get caught up on the latest local news with Ed. 

2. This afternoon, at 4 o'clock, I moseyed up to the Inland Lounge to take part in the Celebration of Life for Betty Moore, a longtime Silver Valley resident who died this past Saturday. She was 91 years old. As is always the case at such gatherings, I saw and got to talk with people I don't see very often. For starters, I had a couple or three involved conversations with Betty's son, Butch. While Butch and I were in one conversation, John Austin arrived and joined us. I hadn't seen John, in person, since high school, although I've read tons of his comments, insights, and remarks on line over the last fifteen years. Terry Lennon and I had a good session and later we did some serious reminiscing about Dick and Floyd's with Cas. I had a good talk with Eric Benson.  I saw a lot of other people I've know over the years from a distance or exchanged a quick hello with them. What I'm about to say isn't eerie, but just the way it is: these community gatherings to honor a person who has died always give me the sense that my past life is flashing before me -- I have so many connections of one degree or another with so many people over so many years and the celebration of Betty's life brought a great number of those people together this afternoon. I swear every decade of my sixty-seven year life returned to me today. 

3. The other day at Yoke's, I bought a bag of salad and this morning I decided to experiment a little bit and add farro to it. I gotta say, this was a great idea. I cooked the farro -- it takes about thirty minutes -- let it cool, and added it along with celery and cucumber to the ingredients in the salad bag and I totally enjoyed the chewy farro mixed in with the crisp, fresh vegetables. I like to mix no recipe random vinaigrettes and I had enough of one I made a while back in the fridge to dress a couple bowls of this salad. I think the vinaigrette was a combination of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic powder, and honey, but I'm not sure. I squeezed juice from a lemon chunk over the salad before putting on the dressing and the lemon brightened it up. I ate helpings of this salad throughout the day and still have some left over for Friday. 

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