Radnelac

Calendar backwards. It might mean something, what the crows squawk. I listen closely, sounds like bullshit to me but who am I to judge? The frogs fuck anyway, and there are egg sacks that will freeze, maybe some of them will survive, who cares? I find I don't. It's a real game played on natural turf and I don't give a shit. Rain turning to sleet, beats against the roof, all I want to do is crawl into my down bag and sleep. Actually, what happened, I wrote early and went to bed early and the frogs woke me later. Pissed me off but I needed to pee, so I suited up and went out with a flashlight; Darwin at work, you really can't not go out and see. We'll call this batch Early Birds, but I doubt that any will survive. Not a big turn-out and I suspect most of the frogs had better sense, still, if this batch, even a part of, survives, they could breed to mate earlier, leading maybe to two batches of tads a year. The frogs do this to me. I don't have time to pay as much attention to them this year. Easy one to remember though, March 1st. They were writhing over and around each other, croaking loudly. Crows also croak, of course. By definition, actually, they're paired in almost every dictionary I own (don't ask, and not nearly enough) in either the first or second line. Impressive agreement. There's always something croaking around here. I join in with my morning clearing of the pipes, a kind of throat clearing snorting that isn't pleasant to be around. This morning I made a strange tea just because I could. Clearing around a Slippery Elm tree, I needed to prune (man intervenes with nature) an early forking off the tree, to give the main stem a better shot at treehood (where ice-storms have failed), convincing myself that I'm doing the right thing. So I have some Slippery Elm inner bark, cambium (a layer of meristematic plant tissue), stripped and drying. Mid morning I walked part of the driveway, collecting dead saplings for starter sticks, pulled up a young sassafras for that burst of smell, took it home, cleaned it, peeled it with a vegetable peeler, drying those fragrant shavings. Made a cup of tea from the two, and with some honey it was good, medicinal almost. I added a splash, just a goodly drop, from the bottle where two ounces of American Ginseng soak in three ounces of grain alcohol. My anodyne against the world. Probably a false positive, but it works for me: writing you allows me to be myself. And a certain collage thing, that anything could to be anywhere. You understand that. Pavlov did good work, and it's true, we respond, I have field notes that go back decades, everyone usually responds, if you pester them enough. Writing is illusion, like all art. Who are you and where am I in this? What's the tell, the intent, what's being attempted? Recounting current events. A coup-stick is usually a willow wand, 10 or 12 feet long, with a unique set of feathers at the end, you touch something and it is your own. You know it, control the situation, knowledge from hell, but you can't say anything, because you're sworn to secrecy.