Stark

Need to rest my arm, but really must work on firewood, so I chainsaw most of what's in the woodshed to length. Tomorrow I'll split, taking it as easy as possible. Lovely blue day, cool, slanted light through stick trees. Perfect day for a walk in the woods, but first I put a pot of beans on to cook, Black Crowders, technically a pea, a legume I favor for its deeply colored and delicious broth. Take a light pack, head out. It's so bright I have to go back home for sunglasses. The wind has died and I'm the only noise in this section until I stop, sit on a stump and listen intensely. The woods are alive, the sounds are subtle. I get disoriented and end up at a road several miles from the house. So it goes. I turn down a couple of rides, because I actually like walking, but I hate walking on a road. All the molecules in our body were forged billions of years ago. It's all about entropy. And text. And the way we construe. Hermeneutical epistemology. Everything makes sense, sooner or later. This pot of Black Crowders is fantastic. Nothing special, an onion, a yellow sweet pepper, chicken stock, a couple of chunks of smoked jowl. A pan of cornbread with chilies. The wind picks up, bound to lose power, SAVE, and get out the oil lamps. Three in the morning and the fridge surges back to life, wakes me from a disturbing dream. Get up to stoke the fire. Don't know when I went to bed. I read Dahlberg for a few hours, ate peas and cornbread a couple of times, wanted to talk with my girls but the phone was out too. Soon as it's light I'll work on firewood, splitting billets, cutting starter sticks; Monday D and I need to build a sturdy table for the wood-carving residency. The next exhibit in the main gallery is a folk art show, Lavon Williams, carved, painted, and highly finished wood. He'll be working with a small group of hand-picked students before we install his show, and their work will be displayed upstairs. This is good planning, a little vertical integration, and the table is fairly simple but with specific requirements, 3 feet by 8 feet with the apron set back so clamps can be used all around the edge, massive legs, plenty of bracing. We get the picture, and know exactly what to build, but something in the directions tells me Lavon has had trouble getting what he needs in the past. No problem here, but we'll build it a little less than 3 feet wide, so we can get it through a door. Found a beautiful place yesterday, where two little creeks came together and the water was so clear and cold it gave me a headache. I was almost napping, sitting on my foam pad, facing south, leaning against a moss-bank, when a beaver waddled into the picture. Beavers are cartoon characters, low-slung, that tail, those teeth, and this one was huge, 25, 30 pounds, he doesn't see me and I refrain from laughing. He drops a young poplar and wedges it crossways in the stream, the beginning of a dam. I wish I wasn't there, because at some point I have to leave and I hate to disturb someone at work, but he goes upstream for whatever stick he's decided he needs next and I manage to disappear without disturbing his progress. Almost lost, I hear a train in Kentucky and alter my path. I'm pretty sure I live over there, a couple of ridge lines to the north and east. Follow a solitary crow for a while, how astray can it lead me? And that's how I found the road. Once I hit the road I knew where I was. The sub-text here, is that 'lost' is relative. It's below freezing and I'm wandering in the woods, not sure, exactly, where I am. I could survive, start a fire, hunker down in a tree tip pit, cover myself with a space blanket, and hike out in the morning, but I know there's a pot of beans at home, and I want to get there. I have several paces, but when I want to get somewhere, I walk 4 miles an hour. It's not a record pace, but I can do it forever. Yeah, you and me and the horse we rode in.