Sweet Whimpering

Walking up the driveway, birds in the under story, scratching and singing. I don't know the songs, but they make a certain sense. Maybe it's the time of year, but there's a longing that isn't there in winter. The salamanders were courting again, in ways I don't understand. I barely understand my own species, oblivious as we are, to where we find ourselves. The napp at the spillway was running full spate, you could kayak Turkey Creek right now, though you'd probably die just beyond the second ford, where the slate slips down a level. K asked me, and I said that I always cooked for my daughters with love. You can caramelize squash if you're willing to take forty minutes. Starch is sugar that doesn't know it yet, a little butter, a little salt, and a lot of time. I do a pork scaloppine with the sauce, caramelized onions and red peppers and squash. It's very good, I haven't fixed a meal like this in a while. Tomorrow should be another morel omelet morning, and I'm looking forward to being late. Local seasonal highlights. Miss the morels here and you really don't have a clue about where you are. It's the same anywhere. This time of year, you don't miss the asparagus in western Colorado, the herring roe in New England. If the locals say you eat cat-tail roots, then that's damned well what you're going to eat. Free-range, and free-choice, for that matter, depending completely on what's available. We all set boundaries, it's part of the process, no one wants to feel threatened. I wonder about my boundaries. No snuggling, not even a kiss, reality is a blur. Rain on a hot tin roof. I had a cat once, Herbert, she'd come in to my room late at night and sleep on my head. I watched her die, another motor vehicle fatality, right in front of the house where I was living at the time. Her body was broken, she looked as me, green eyes, and licked my hand. I buried her under a spread of Iris bulbs, those deep purple ones that mimic the night. Years later, living on the Vineyard, I found a bunch of bulbs the same color, blooming at the edge of the land-fill. Came back in the fall and dug them up, they became my flower of choice. A favorite song, Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up In Blue" or Son House making a point about levels of suffering. We are not given to know. What we extract is the barest amount we need to live. Whatever the trace elements we require. Take my bed, I don't need it any more. The frogs are, finally, louder than the rain, which receding, beats a final Bach Partita. A strict mathematical progression. Somehow emotion is trapped in the numbers. Explain Bach and the world is explicated. I drank, so as not to cry; wrote you, my soul exposed. Eventually, even the Whip-O-Will fails. I listen too closely. It's a habit. I take the rain as a metaphor. Nothing is what it seems. The finger of dawn. I want to wake you, but I don't want to be intrusive. We've slept enough, the night is over, the rain has receded to individual drips, a fugue, if you will, and it's time to make breakfast.