Rainy Fog

Visibility down to 100 feet, nothing stirring, rain all day. Harvest rainwater, and as this is the last day above freezing in the long-range forecast, heat the house and put water on for a bath, shave and hair wash. Put the pot on the edge of the stove and go for a walk during a lull. The low-lands are flooding, but I should be able to get out tomorrow. I make a list of my needs then cross out half of the items as not absolutely necessary. Haven't driven up to the house in so long, weeks, that the larder is slim, I'm out of onions, for instance, but cook a small pot of black beans with dehydrated onions, garlic and dried herbs that's really quite good. Need to carry in some eggs and dried milk and I could live on cornbread and beans for a very long time. Rikki Lee Jones on the radio, what a voice. I was listening while I put books away, there were 50 on the coffee table and the piles had become precarious, problem is that when I put something away, I almost always pull out another that catches my eye. No net gain here, but I do end up with a new sequence of reading. All non-fiction, I get my fiction from the library and most of it, recently, has been crap. Even the newest Ian Rankin fell apart for me, typos and factual errors, doesn't anyone proof-read anything anymore? Winter, living alone, bad weather coming, I have piles of wood inside, I have piles of clothes on handy chairs, an assortment of hats and mufflers on the dining table, my winter tools leaning against the wall near the back door. Now that the girls are gone, I need a smaller house, something I could heat with a light-bulb. A cave would do, except for the books, and I need the books, but I could fit all my necessary things in 900 sq ft and without an upstairs, though that would deny me a staircase. I do love building stairs, and it seems to be a discipline I understand in a fundamental way, the last several sets of stairs I've built are very nice. Mine, here, blow out the stops; after years of having built them, they still take my breath away. They were the final brick, really, in the chain of reasoning, that allowed the materials to speak for themselves. You need a certain competence with tools, but that's rote, you can learn to run a saw; the rest, the larger part, is paying attention to what the material wants to do. I think about doing a Staircase Show with Pegi, how her girls could slink between the treads. Mountaintop coal removal is a joke, the overburden has to go someplace, you block drainage and something backs up; the classic case, you fuck with nature, and she bites you on the ass.