Megladon Tooth

97 degrees today. When I get home I strip down, go out on the deck and pour a gallon of tepid water over my head. The Black Dell, my square-headed girlfriend, doesn't do well in these temps. I have to use a loud fan, which I hate and is distracting, to be able to write at all. Life is vexing. There are a couple of shark's teeth in the artifact collection, Megalodon, old and large, I know the teeth, found one once, just north of St. Augustine, Florida, and they are impressive. Can't decide if it's a traded good (probably) or really high water in some warm period of history. I don't know enough to know. The gaps in my knowledge are legion. It's amazing I can butter toast. Only because I've allowed myself a tutorial in Toast And Buttering, a perfect course, in which we explored a great many possibilities and realized we all had different tastes. A toasted piece of sourdough, for me, smeared with softened butter filling every pore, is exactly right. B swears by olive oil. I crave animal fats, they fuel my machine. Bacon grease needs a place on the periodic table. I know it weighs less than water because it floats, maybe a .67, or a .42. They're closed access to a lot of roads, late for the water to be so high. Good growing season. Water's good, as long as you live on a ridge. All the springs are below me. Power out gotta go. Never did come back on. Went to bed. Overcast and hot this morning, the cicadas are loud and bumping into the house, strange. Make coffee and go out on the back porch to see what's what. Big leafy sassafras tree is swarming with them, flying in from all around, disoriented, maybe they go to ground soon. Brush work for a couple of hours and I have to stop, drenched and hungry. A sharp sling-blade is a joy to use in young canes and tree sprouts. What was bare dirt 6 weeks ago is a jungle of saplings, reaching for light, some of the blackberry is five feet, impressive growth, the sumac is two feet, the red maple over a foot, hundreds of them, competing for space. By contrast, in front of the outhouse is a stand of young poplar 6 years old (post Ice Storm), way too thick, I'll thin them this year, that are densely canopied, no direct light gets through, and the ground is bare under them. I do a stand up bath on the deck, or maybe a heavy shower: strip and pour half-a-gallon of water over your head, then lather (I'm using a really nice Welsh soap one of the board members gave me, we had talked about scent one time when she was visiting the museum with friends), and rinse by pouring a gallon of nice, tepid water over your head. It occurs to me that I've bathed a lot of different ways in a lot of strange places. Rerereading the McCord novella recently and his stone killer stops, after a naked run, and bathes in a stock tank. They were a specialty of mine, when I was living out of my truck in the backcountry of western Colorado and Utah; and the map of springs and seeps was an important part of my gear, when I was in the Four Corners area, where every bath was an adventure. There's probably a book there, "Back Country Hygiene", several, "Back Country Cooking", Back Country Self-Medication", "Back Country Avoiding The Law", airport books, just pamplets, really, not books at all. I was so pissed when the power went out last night. I had been working on a paragraph, in my head, all day, knew some points I wanted to touch, some things I might talk about: for me, as a writer, this is heaven. Couldn't wait to write and then chopped off by power failure. I'm too dependent on the grid, what we all take for granted. I need a back-up system that gives me half-an-hour. A finish the sentence period. Time to collect my thoughts.

Wild plum is
lovely, and the
lingering smell.