Nothing Is

To save an argument I'm willing to admit anything is my fault. I usually know where I stand and my ego isn't delicate, if someone knows a better way to skin a particular cat, I defer to greater knowledge. Waxing moon, ghostly, over stick trees. One of those nights, I can't sleep, remembered sins. It's a delicate balance, living in the world; on one hand you have to be humble, on the other, assertive. Not a paradox, exactly, but conflicted. I vacillate when it comes to pain. Often it's just a reminder, a bedside clock (I've never had one of those, but I understand the idea) or a simple chalk board where you make notes. My shoulder is sore because I've been cutting a lot of wood by hand, it's not a mystery, where the slow ache comes from, I rub on some heat cream Lauren sent from Utah, it works well, a topical aspirin. Sometimes the pain is deeper, and you have to grit your teeth, knowing full well you bear at least partial responsibility for the way you feel. The metaphysics of suffering. Text is merely words. You can posit a writer, someone who composes, but the burden will always be with the reader. Three opossums in the last mile home. A nuclear family. Dead and glassy eyed. A blasted hill-side. God send. The angels are crying, the angles. Hill-top mining. Don't get me started. Stove started smoking again, when I got up to pee the house was full of smoke. Open windows. Of course it's a cold night, of course the house gets cold. The fact that I can direct vent the last of this particular fire, by opening the chimney damper and shutting the oven damper means that the problem is not in the stovepipe but in the stove. Dig out the manual, there's an exploded view of the stove showing all of the parts. This morning, in insulated bibs, I start taking the stove apart just enough to see the few working parts. Nothing. Back to the manual and I finally understand a sentence that is trying to remind me to make sure the side smoke-chase on the oven, away from the firebox, is completely cleaned as there is a tendency for it to get clogged at the bottom. This is all in Irish-English which is not exactly the English I'm used to. Why it takes so long to understand. Sure enough. I take out the two eyes (they call them hobs in Ireland) on that side of the stove, which allows me good access and there is a solid clog just above the bottom. Five minutes work. The stove is a rocket, suddenly, like when it was new. I light a fire right away and it just takes off. It doesn't just work, it works perfectly. I feel both quite stupid and very bright at the same time. For the first time in my life, I pump my fists, like an athlete of some kind, the US Problem Solving Team. I go to town to see D at the museum, to explain to him how dumb I'd been. Follow the smoke, man, I tell him, in all seriousness. The winter now looks possible. D and Carma looking after me, he gives an open cardboard box with early and extravagant xmas presents. Really good winter work gloves, a new set of crampons (so now I have a guest set of crampons, which, I mean really, come on, is very cool), and, and this is pure Carma, projecting correctly what someone else might need, I would never have thought to buy a really nice bathrobe that I could wear over clothes, mid-winter, writing at the far end of the house away from the stove. Brilliant. More eccentric, probably, but warmer. The winter writing wardrobe. What a hoot. I have 2 pants of green sweats, a gray Levi sweatshirt that I wear every night, 4 pair of thick socks, I rotate among them. But now, the bathrobe. I like being warm.