Ascomycetes

Another day of storms. Out, in the morning, but doing brush-work when everything is saturated produces a green slime that stains whatever it touches. I walk down and clip some young sassafras trees that have become top heavy with water and bowed down from both sides into the driveway, an effective roadblock. Sassafras are very limber when they are young, often wrapping around and around a stiffer neighbor. Wonderful shapes. I'm going to use some slightly older trees for my deck railing. Thinking again about the set of stairs I want to build out there. Single massive stringer, notched, half-log treads, cantilevered out both ends, curved dogwood railing; the stringer needs to curve through 90 degrees of arc, big quarter turn up and to the left, I can see it in my mind's eye. Worried today about the single bearing point, would like to use a large rock, piece of sandstone probably; can make a serious connection at the top, notch and large pegs, and at the bottom would need to epoxy a couple of large re-bar pegs into the rock and drill holes in the bottom of the stringer. Seems like it would work, dead weight holding it all together. The last chapter in the house book I worked on for several years, stolen in the robbery, "Toward Building A House," was a long essay about building the stairs inside my house, 30 or 40 pages about designing (actually allowing the pieces to decide what they could do) and then building the stairs. Reminded of that. How, for me, imaging, imagining, is such an important part of the process. Get a drink, roll a smoke, and stare at the place something is going to be constructed, a staircase, a bookcase, a site where a house is going to be. Now, because I only take on certain projects, there is often a pile of collected materials that I want to use, I need to see the materials in the place where they'll go. Arcane, almost, but I am grown enamored of using natural materials and not distorting them much. The rock I need (available free) weighs 840 pounds, I think about how I'll move it, get it into position, not that difficult, really, just slow. In Telluride we hired a guy with a back-hoe and used a chain off the bucket; my project will be more Egyptian, with rollers and ropes, maybe some bacon fat. I've moved a lot of heavy things (the Realist School in headstones, "He Moved A Lot Of Heavy Things") and I think it through step by step, paying attention to detail, a slow motion documentary film about something apparently very boring, moving a rock from one place to another, and I'm the one riveted member of the audience. Get almost to the end and realize I don't know how to get the rock, physically, from the rollers (I think if I use four inch schedule 40 plastic pipe for the rollers I won't even need runners) into the prepared hole. Then I see it, of course, the old tripod and come-a-long contraption, haven't used it in years, but perfect in this case. A good day, when you remember how to do something that might have been a problem. Patchouli leaves were used to wrap silk from the east for those long trips westward, bugs don't like camphor, and we were introduced to a scent, bug repellent to perfume. I still like pure Patchouli, anoint myself after the weekly bath, remember things. Particular smells make you remember things with no mediation. Strong connections, attachments. "Going to a white-run barbeque is, I think, like going to a gentile internist: It might turn out all right, but you haven't made any attempt to take advantage of the percentages." Calvin Trillin. "How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?" Charles De Gaulle. "The only real stumbling block is the fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude." Julia Child. "Don't think---cook!" Wittgenstein. And, of course I never get to the subject, that's a given. Ascomycetes, touch them and they release spores, molds are a lot like mushrooms, the way they spread.

Tom

A pileated woodpecker
just at dark and all the
other birds were silent.