Geography of Memory

Gray day with drizzle. I spend most of it at the museum, watching D finish the catalog. It's a lovely thing, good work by all involved, and a pile of credit to D. I can't wait to install the show, but I want to re-hang the Carters first. A long list of things I need to do. I have to stop reading Mary's letters for a month or so, and read some literature about outsider art so I can docent that show without sounding like an idiot. Left work at four and came the long way home, up the creek, where fog was filling the hollows and everything was slightly surreal. Went through the ford, to clean the mud out of my wheel-wells. It had gotten so thick it was affecting the alignment. The creek, at the ford, is about thirty feet wide, on smooth sandstone and you have to gauge the depth from landmarks. To clean the wheel-wells well requires five or six repetitions, back and forth, forward and reverse. Some times, in the Spring, there's a small line of pick-up trucks, waiting to wash their underbellies. Walked up the hill with an umbrella, so I could stop and watch the ground fog or mist, or whatever it was, curtail vision at maybe 100 yards. Off-beat staccato pattern of raindrops on the umbrella and also the sound of light rain on leaves. I'm struck, again, by the mediation the walk-in provides; even after you achieve the top of the hill (not quite, you still need to gain 80 feet) there's still 200 yards to the house. Makes my eye water to think about it. Mid-winter, when the wind is blowing: it's a bastard shot from hell. But in the house, there is relative comfort, a place you kick back, probably in multiple layers, a fire to tend, what was not said earlier, what you might have said: that's it, what you might have said, what it comes down to. I can't believe the way I string myself along. In my lucid moments, when I think coherently about life and death, I'm pretty good, utter some last words and pass into compost. That's my plan. Deal with the signage. I have to go to bed.