Fully Fall

At the top of the driveway, the young sassafras are a thing of great beauty, gold and yellow. 40 to 50% of the leaves gone on the ridge-top and I can now, for the first time since early April, see the other side of the hollow. Drive in with supplies for the weekend, but, as heavy rain is forecast, I took the truck back down to the bottom of the hill. Lovely, walking back up without a pack, flushed two grouse, that, as usual, startled me. A huge V of geese overhead, maybe 50, honking a running commentary on something. The women, staff, at the museum, were a riot today, I kept my head down, checked the calendar to see what phase the moon is in. Another event, something called Business After Hours, where business people gather for a few beers, a bite to eat, and chat amongst themselves. I duck out, as soon as everything is prepped, as this is not a crowd I would hang with. Too many suits. I know my comfort zone and I've stayed late twice in a week for functions, a record for me. The ladies liked the squash soup, it was good, I liked it both hot and cold, as I do when I make the same kind of soup with cherries. Made a mean chili, way too hot for almost anyone, a traditional chili, beans (pintos), ground elk, onions, garlic, tomatoes, a great deal of green and red chili powder, and I never had designed on eating it in a bowl. Scooped on tortilla chips with salsa and a thin slice of avocado was what I had in mind. Really, really good. I made some tortilla chips with corn and acorn flour, very little salt. I need just a small fire in the stove now, to chase the chill and damp. The house smalls good. An interesting aspect of work, in the current configuration, the smoke breaks. Sara usually comes down and finds me, we go out to the loading dock concrete sofa. Many things are decided there, and now Tammy, who is one of those 3 cigs a week people, comes out occasionally with us, and then today, Pegi came out too, waving a pencil between her fingers, as it were a cigarette; and the four of us were perched there, lifting our legs when cars would use the alley, talking museum business. Sara and I have declared the loading dock a No-Fly zone, where anything can be said, Tammy and Pegi catch on quickly, and we talk there, openly and honestly. It's a very cool aspect of working with other people, the chance to be open and honest. We always hold enough back to protect ourselves, I think that's the universal condition, we are monads but we operate in this enormous Venn mosaic, where everything overlaps. Thinking about dust today, the way it infiltrates. I now collect used Bounce sheets at the laundromat. I don't use them on/with clothes, I bought a box soon after I found out how useful they were for other things and used them once in the dryer with some jeans. I itched for two weeks. Fucking chemicals, man. Still, I use them for cleaning glass shelves at the museum, and I use them the clean my computer screen, and wipe my windows after I clean them, every few years. I think what they do is break the electro-static charge. I might be making that up. I ran a little experiment, to see if I wasn't the victim of yet another urban myth. Watched with the magnifying glass as dust I had stirred from the ash-box of the cookstove settled on several pieces of glass. I had prepared the surfaces and I had closed the house up tightly, so that any currents were fostered from subtle changes in temperature. The dust motes, which when viewed closely look like very successful, very light hair balls, a billion filaments, want to connect, want to amass, it's the nature of useless shit, it collects in the corner. But they bounced off the sheet that had been treated with Bounce. They positively clung to the glass that had been treated with any detergent, and they even liked the sheets of glass that had been wiped with an actual glass-cleaning product. Dust is insidious. When I watched closely, though, I noticed, there was an actual charge, when contact was made, the ball simply bounced away.

Couldn't Send last night. Thunder storms. Walked out this morning, and a fine thing it was, downhill, first light, everything cleaned by rain and prisms on every leaf-tip. A glorious sight. Spent most of the day working on the Historical Show with staff. Wondering if I'm becoming too assertive. We need to get this show together, so I can install it, consequently, I push things a bit. I thought they needed pushing. My role is mercurial. Sara would, I think, tell me if I was out-stepping my job description. 1926 catalog from Standard Supply (a large plumbing and heating supply company, wholesale) and I almost brought it home, to look at the pictures. One was labeled 'Battery Of Porcelain Urinal Stalls' and there were eight of them in a circle, around a shared cistern that flushed them. I want one. But the item that really caught my eye, was a thing I never knew existed, a sub-section, in the boiler division, "Isolator Garbage Consumers" (which phrase I had actually thought before, as it might relate to Kim, Kurt, and me) and there was a top of the line unit that was drop-dead perfect design/function. Once I got the concept. It was a large cast-iron closet, and you threw everything in there, household waste, and when it was full, it flamed-on and reduced your waste to ashes. How cool is that? The product description said: "Provides for the sanitary odorless accumulation and complete destruction, at the source of origin, of all garbage and waste material." That about covers it. Not to cut too fine a point, but what we do is create waste. There was a rain, hard enough, this afternoon, to knock leaves off trees. So it was raining leaves, really wet leaves; they lose the ability to shed water as they rot. I love the fall, you either hibernate or die. The decomposition has already begun. Mackletree was covered in leaves, to the point that you didn't know where the edges were, and my driveway, I'm pleased to report, was an absolute carpet of leaves. This is one of those days that defines (that last s might not be necessary) the year. When you might dance naked and do other things you wouldn't ordinarily do. I look up and see Emily's tombstone. I'm not sure it gets better than this.