No Beans, but Sausage

I SPEND AN inordinate amount of time reminding myself that everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay, I told myself two weeks ago when a wild cold snap ripped through the Pacific Northwest and froze my pipes, despite my precautions. At least one burst, so I’m back to bathing and doing dishes out of a soup pot filled with water from a nearby well pump—“back” both like old-timey and like last year, when I lived without running water for more than a month until someone gave me money for the repair shop (you really are lifesavers, paid subscribers and donators! Thank you!!🖤). Now that my main occupation seems best described as “epic trust fall,” it takes constant faith that things will turn out to let myself keep falling. To keep becoming, whatever comes.

Yesterday I forgot to get beans. I’d parked my whole house near a grocery store in a town I was passing through, and I was proud that I got ingredients to scratch-cook a soup and enough produce ($10) to get Washington’s $5 discount while using my EBT card, because often in the winter I only have energy to feed myself out of boxes or cans. And then after I’d left and parked at the RV park on the water I was treating myself to, I realized: I forgot beans. There’d be no cannellini in my Tuscan stew.

I’d left my bike, which I use to get around towns for errands, at the farm I call home base an hour away. I didn’t want to pack up and move a whole gas-guzzly house back to the store. I felt bummed about my beanlessness (as far as soup is concerned; as far as genitalia, no beans but sausage is working great for me) for a while before I remembered: There was vegan Italian sausage in my freezer.