Bug Drone

This time of year, the cold air rolls right off the ridge-tops and down into the bottoms. When I get on Mackletree tomorrow, all the roof-tops will be heavily frosted, but it's 42 degrees up here and the bugs are celebrating with a fall cacophony that could raise the dead. I'll miss the first six or eight frosts. Walking down the logging road with a pair of clippers, to clear a winter path, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. The yellow timber rattler is back, her winter den is about 100 yards north of my back steps and that seems acceptable. I don't go over there much and when I do I carry a walking stick, forever poking at things, so she doesn't pose much of a the art Knowing there's a bear around, I tend to make more noise, and snakes are sensitive to vibration. Bears don't see well. So I'm making more noise than I normally would, I usually move around soundlessly in the woods, but it behooves me now to sing out loud, smatters of catches and advertising jiggles, bang my tuna-fish cans together. The squirrels were out in force today, like they were concerned about the winter, gathering acorns, running up and down trees. It worries me, I need three or four loads of fill, so I can get to my house, I need water and supplies; right now I need juice and bread and coffee and cream and butter, and other things, too numinous to mention. Strong line of storms each of the last two nights took out the power. I re-hung 13 Carter paintings and it took much longer than I expected because one of them "River Boat Pilot", an iconic painting worth a fortune, was framed to hang on D rings, because of its weight, and the wall, where it was to hang, had been framed with steel studs and both of the D rings fell on studs. I couldn't use anchors, so I had to wire the damned thing and hang it in a different way. Part of what makes working at a museum interesting is having to figure out how to hang some things. I have to move 27 paintings downstairs and the elevator is out of commission so that means 27 trips down the stairs, 13 of them Carter portraits (his painting degree was in portraiture) including the most valuable painting at the museum; D goes to Springfield tomorrow to get 11 self-portraits from Mark Shepp. They're great and witty. We have to set and hang that show next week. Then I want to take a week off and work on the Janitor Book, then Linda comes to rehearse the Emily show (next month), the performances, in early November, then the largest fund-raiser of the year, second week of November, and I'll then need another week off, to recover. A patron, Barbara Rosenberg, called today, and wanted to bring in some art work for the fun-raiser. She and her husband are wealthy and travel. They actively buy art, mostly high-end prints. As we all do, they have limited wall space, so we get their overflow. They keep very accurate files on the provenance of everything. By high-end prints what I mean are the ten to a hundred copies that are printed on special hand-made paper and signed by the artist. Generally there is a further edition of a thousand, done on archival paper, and signed on the plate. The difference in price is between thousands and hundreds. She brought us today, a Miro (8 to 12 thousand) and four Erte prints that are stunning, the printing is incredible, probably four thousand apiece. They're beautiful. Three of them are beautifully framed, the fourth one, my favorite, we'll probably hang on to until we can afford to frame it. If they insist on selling it, I'll buy it, I know how to cut a matt and build a frame. It's a four thousand dollar print and if I got it for three hundred dollars, I could afford an evening framing. However we're framing this. I wanted to be home, here, talking to you. Everything else is just the net. A random cast. I learned how to throw a weighted net in Key West and never forgot. Like riding a bicycle and all those other things. A weighted net might have half-ounce weights sewn in on the outer perimeter every six inches or a foot, and if you spin it correctly you capture everything larger than your mesh. A great spin that I always considered Jamaican. Maybe just who I learned it from. She was actually Haitian and threw a perfect circular net: I mean perfect. When the weights hit the surface of the water you could connect the dots. A figure with that many faces becomes a circle. I know it's not, straight lines and all of that, but I can imagine a circle. Anything that allows me to imagine. I'd better send this, another line of storms moving through.