Cold Rain

Snow tomorrow. Still haven't had a frost on the ridge top, but the bottoms of all the hollows, and the entire valley of Mackletree, will be encased in ice at dawn tomorrow. Cold flows like a liquid, settling in the lower spots. On the ridge, sumac flames a brilliant red, the sassafras is a perfect yellow. The leaves are so deep I have to walk carefully, because of the acorns under foot. I leave my truck at the bottom of the hill, hiking in with a few things, cream for my coffee, juice, a few cans of soup, whiskey, tobacco; I eat, I drink, I smoke. Mac has offered money for the transition, I may take him up on that, this brutal life is a younger man's game. What I need is hot running water and a thermostat. This would be the winter of my discontent. I can't do this, and I don't want that. I bury my ears in a down bag, I don't want to hear. Survival is a marginal thing. Phone and electricity out, so I read by oil lamp. Finally crawl back in bed, tucked under multiple layers. Drag myself upright, running late, shave wearing the sweatshirt I've altered for cold mornings (the neck band is cut out, so I can shave my neck) and head to town. Sure enough, all the roofs are covered in frost, while on the ridge it was 38 degrees. Much colder the next three nights, then warming somewhat. D and I are both exhausted, but we do the lighting, do the labels, I touch-up the pedestals upstairs, start hauling gear to the basement. Finally, at 4:30, D tells me to go home, I'm limping, and every time I stop I just stare into space. The solace of the middle distance. Hike in again, because of the projected snow. I need to clean the smoke chase in the cookstove, knock down the stovepipe, and bang on the spark prevention stovepipe cap, a task I have perfected to just leaning out an upstairs window and hitting the damned thing with a length of bamboo. I will no longer climb a ladder 19 feet in the air. I want the cookstove dead cold in the morning, so I just turn the two oil-filled electric radiators on low. It'll be cold in the house tonight, maybe 50 degrees, like winter camping in a tent. Waiting for this first frost, to kill the bugs, before I spend a long day under the house, re-insulating the second half of the floor, which I didn't get done last year. Bugs can bother me more than cold: I can put on a lot of clothes, and as long as it doesn't get below freezing inside, I'm fine. It gets hard to type, but I wear shooter's gloves, because I only type with two fingers anyway. It's hard to roll cigarettes when your fingers are cold. The area outside the main building at Janitor College, Janus Hall, imagine a snow bank eight feet tall on either side, and a trampled corridor that might have been twelve feet wide running between. Everyone rolled their own, a common denominator, and that space, that furrowed space, was dark brown in failed cigarettes. Sometimes I surprise myself. I like those last couple of sentences. The second 'that' could be replaced with 'the', but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Who would notice? I read things fifty times, because I'm looking for the nuance. Take a single paragraph of Proust and read it several times, it unfolds. Familiarity breeds content. Consider Emily. "Called Back", what a world of information is conveyed. But I don't have a degree in philosophy, so I'm hesitant to say anything. Sleet. Frozen fucking rain by any other name.