Home Again

What's that color called, a green brown, like a cat's eye. Palomino is a breed decided solely on the basis of color. Not olive. A nut, oh, right, hazel nuts, what's the common name, filberts, I forgot how much I liked them. Like brown rice, they taste of earth. Actually green isn't in the definition, but most people think it is. Stuck in town due to heavy rain and I must have left a paragraph hanging on my computer there. Electricity had been out at my house, there was some music at the pub that I wanted to hear, and the layers of leaves on the driveway, saturated from days of rain, were slick as goose-shit. A metaphor based in fact. The winter I house-sat at Lucy's Crotch, on Cape Cod, geese over-wintered in the yard and and on the dock, I had to go the Goodwill store and buy a pair of cheap golf shoes so I could walk down to the water. Art work coming in today, from several directions, and Pegi's Cirque Halloween programs start tonight, as I write, and I needed to do some things for that. Another chaotic day, with people on the road, no receptionist, we had to eat lunch in shifts. Many times this week I've not only the only staff person at the museum, but also the receptionist; I don't mind, if I'm at the desk I read something from the library. Carma was at a library book sale the other day and picked up some nice hardbound books for me. The history of glass, the history of dust, the history of sunflowers, a book about Johnson's dictionary, and a book about the OED. I put them on the new pile, which is on top of the defunct aquarium where Samara raised her poisonous frogs. The Winter's Reading, the label would read, if there was a label. Mostly, the pile is composed of books sent to me by other people, things they think I would like and often they're correct in their judgment. I order remaindered books on any subject that is germane at the time, I never really give up a subject or an author that takes my interest, and I read fast enough that I often reread a book that I had borrowed from the library, then found at a book sale for 50 cents, and bought, so I'd have a copy. At the Reception Desk today I was reading the intro to a selection of Basho's poems, I know these poems like Linda knows Emily. I have his complete works, prose and poems; I love about him most that quality, "sabi" in Japanese, which implies contented solitariness. I'm not sure we have a word for that in English. Because we don't do that whole monk-like retreat thing anymore, almost the exact opposite; now, the deal is you become a reality TV person, game show host.