Mackletree

Phone's out, probably some burned snag on Mackletree, I have to SAVE and SEND later. Hard rain falling gets me up, checking for leaks, putting out a bucket to collect some water. The frogs are loud. A single Whip-O-Will braves the weather. I made a great dish tonight. Needed some bacon fat, used the last of the pint I brought from Florida at Xmas, so I bought a pound, fried some with a stinky cheese omelet for brunch, then collected a few morels during a lull. I had to dry them on brown paper sacks, then chopped them and cooked with some scallions in the hot bacon fat. Two people this past week had mentioned stuffing mushrooms and some stuffers were remaindered. Mushrooms stuffed with mushrooms, I should have thought of this before, a heart-stopping testament to improvisation. I pretended I was at a cocktail party, made some cucumber sandwiches. Ended up getting quite tight and talking with someone I didn't know about the first few seconds of the Big Bang. Actually, no one was there, I was talking with myself, but it was a real conversation, I took parts. Engaging life fully, as Thoreau would have it. Today he was reminding me of "Works And Days", Hesiod, gnomic. What is that crap that gathers in the corner of your eye? Probably dust, gathered into an eddy by fluid, whatever that liquid your eye produces. Glenn's correct, you know, it's all drainage. I was driving home the other day, minding my own business, which probably translates as spaced out; driving slowly, staring at the burned out zone, east side of Mackletree, and there was a place, I stopped, where a dozer had cut a break right up the hillside. An ugly but necessary scar, and it was raining hard, I was worried about getting up the driveway, but what caught my eye, was the riverlet coming down the cut. I was watching a gully form, right in front of me, something that would exist as a land-form long after I'm gone. A random bit of terra-forming. Geography is a live event. Route 50, going west, that section of Tall-Grass Prairie in Kansas. Everything relates to everything else. the older I get. I was thinking about something today, then forgot what it was, found myself staring at an iris. That's life, I thought, staring at one thing and thinking about another. Really, when you think about it. The Fire of 09. Repercussions, what happens as a product of. I'm sure thinking about this, what happens next, how could I not? It seems there are things we don't talk about, certain private things, Skip talks about them, Steven sometimes, I give them a passing notice. It isn't so much what we talk about as the way we say it. Take the sonnet, it's fourteen lines, there's a scheme but no rules, really, put that in the hands of a magician. Blend in a really good single-malt, one less peaty, a couple of shots, then ask them what they think they mean. My bet is they get all weepy and talk about their childhood. I'm a hard-assed realist, when it comes down to it, I respect nothing that hasn't been through a fire. Mackletree explodes.