Mud

Frost coming out the ground. Nice set of fox prints at the head of the driveway. I'd walked over to test the ground for a possible run to town and fell on my ass in the mud. Slick clay. Thought to make a resupply run and drive back up to the house, but no chance yet. Probably could make it up in 4-wheel high and back down in 4-wheel low, but would seriously rut the top of the driveway. Not really out of everything, and I can carry in 25 lb packs this week as needed. Rain and warmer temps coming, replenish the water supply. Good to go. Still smiling about the visit with Lady Di. Such a perfect house-guest. Brilliant, carried her own kit bag (pulling your weight, as my Granddad, a mule-trader, always said), and a fine conversationalist. After we got home Friday, chili heating on the cookstove, B came over for some sparkling talk, and we arranged to get together again, before Diana returns to Erie. B and I'll cook, an eggplant marinara to die for, a cream soup, some other things, maybe crab cakes. Sarah and Di can talk Feminist Studies, I've saved a Ridge zin. I imagine a great evening. When B and I cook together, it always is, though there is often hell to pay in the morning. Sweaty outdoor work all day, steady taking off layers as the temps rose, and tracking mud all day. The floor in the house is a disaster, but I can clean that tomorrow or the next day, it's more important that I shave and clean up so I can show up at the museum without offending anyone's sensibilities. Besides, I like to get clean, I think I write better. The drip-edge off the back of the woodshed is a quagmire and I usually remember to step over it, but occasionally I'm spaced out and step in it. I knew the lugs of my boots were caked with crap, so before my last foray outside I'd put a pair of slippers just inside the door, where I could reach them, stopped on the stoop, sat, and scraped the grooves with my pocket knife. With damp paper towels I pickup most of the larger pieces of clay I had deposited on earlier trips inside. Maybe if I made a thermos of tea I wouldn't have to go back inside so frequently. Fucking mess. There's probably a lesson in this. I'm rereading some Octavio Paz, he's fearless in his essays, like Davenport, he understands, slants by the way he reports; Montaigne merely reports, but no, that isn't actually the case, you can't 'merely report', there's always that question of identity. Paz: "The transmutation of the primordial sun ---the gold that was everybody's, when everything was gold --- into the omniscient eye of the bureaucratic Police State is as impressive as the transformation of excrement into banknotes. But no one, so far as I know, has ever embarked upon an investigation of the subject." Diana had commented on the fact that I was rarely political, or even personal. I don't have an axe to grind, they took it away, along with my belt and shoe-laces, thinking I might harm myself. The positive thing about being robbed is that you develop a sense of the necessary. If you were raised in a card-board box, the important thing is the card-board box, not the knick-knacks. You can replace a ceramic mouse, your ethics are established before you speak, which way the wind blows. First there is an immediacy, then there is familiarity, then a kind of iconic thing happens, then it's mythic. Such is language. Maybe it's just the way the brain works. I'm nearly normal but I have questions. I'm willing to trade, but I'm not willing to give up my beliefs. Gold is merely gold: when ice explodes and trees smoke, you need to pay attention. Something is happening. What did B say -it doesn't have to be real to be authentic- something like that. This is very real. I need more fat on my ass if I'm going to fall on it. My fingers are cracking. The natural world in spades. Omit the political, the personal, get down to the thing itself; that red flash, another woodpecker, is enough. The coin of my world. I need to walk the driveway because I must, to stop, look up and see, breathing hard but not dead yet.