Walking In

Nothing in mind, I just wanted to get to the bottom of the hill and let my reflexes take over. A modest pack, all the food groups covered, tobacco, whiskey, and the makings for a pot of chili. I leave work early, so I can get a fire started before the sun sets, and I'm walking up the hill in my usual manner, doddering, stopping often to see which way the leaves blow, what the tracks of small mammals might tell me; merely curious, and I'm maybe half way up the hill, protected, as it were, in the hollow, when I hear the wind. It's blowing a full gale on top of the ridge, and I know that last few hundred yards to the house is going to be brutal. It's a sonic environment. The roar of wind in the trees on the ridge top. My eyes tear up. The last few yards are difficult. Going home. Where, exactly, to place your step, becomes an issue; mud and various detritus. I'm aware of what I don't say, there's a reason, but I don't know what it is yet. It's easy enough to weather a mistake. Achieving the ridge is always a major accomplishment. Not just what you think. The physicality transcends anything you might have thought. Battered thus. It's easy to be glib, the way reality presents itself, but my foot is caught in the door. Clearly a euphemism for something hot and steamy. A bowl of rice, whatever that means. Listen, someone told me recently that I shouldn't believe everything I see. And that got me wondering. I don't see only what I want to see, but other things too. Wind all night, and still this morning blowing to beat the band. The stick forest sways, dropping deadwood. Too warm for the end of January, sap is flowing and Ronnie is already making syrup. I intend to tap a sycamore (the mackle tree) this year; I read that the Shawnee made syrup from that sap too. I smile to remember the ice storm of '03, when I was without electricity for seven weeks. Back then I took my whiskey on ice and there were so many shattered maples, exuding sap that froze into icicles, that I collected them and kept them in a box on the back porch for my nighttime libations. That drink, "The Ice Storm", was popular with the various electric company and phone company men that actually walked in to tell me I'd be without either service for several more weeks. Tomorrow I need to go to town to do my laundry and I should be able to drive back in with clean clothes and supplies. I need liquids and they're heavy. Started a chili-like dish in the crock pot, based on a pork tenderloin and black beans, with a liberal quantity of chilies and a variety chili powders. Interesting, about the chili powders, people send them to me, and I usually have a dozen or more different varieties on hand, and I haven't bought a single one in ten years. Nor jeans. What the obesity epidemic has done for me, to put it bluntly, is to supply me with free pants. I've decided to cull my denim shirts. I tend to keep them, even after they're worn out, as a kind of installation, on a six-foot rod in my bedroom. It takes years to wear out a denim shirt, if it's in a rotation with several others. They wear out at the neck, if you only wash your hair once a week and only get your hair cut twice a year, and then they wear out at the elbows. By that time there are probably cigaret holes and various spatters of paint. I thought about doing a show that would be called "Retired Shirts" but then decided to just throw them away. Then decided, what the hell, keep them, I have the room and they are historic artifacts. The idea of framing them, for a show, appeals to me, I don't know why, but when something hits me that way, I always have to stop, and consider whatever it was that made me stop. That's why I leave early. Dim-witted, more than anything else. I can't ignore things, I wasn't blessed with that gene; what I have to do is muddy my knees and lean close. It's probably just an effect, affect, wait, no, I can't decide, of all those psychotropic drugs I was sampling at the time. I'm amazed now, that I didn't die then, running into a tree or something.