Slight Variations

I wanted to go into town through the fog along the river road, so I drove the long way around. On the seven-and-a-half miles on Upper Twin I didn't pass a single person. Hemlock trees in the Wilderness Area (where they don't cut or remove anything) were luminous in the slanted morning light. The dappled effect was so strong I had to put on sunglasses. There's a guy that raises fighting cocks on the creek, and a couple of them were in the road. Very beautiful birds. They looked at the truck aggressively and I shot them a bird and moved on. Had to wear a sweatshirt this morning, for the first time this season. Working the extra day because we needed to get a couple of pictures in frames. D had built the frames but a fairly large one hadn't been painted and I wanted to get that done. Used an excellent stain-blocker primer, after some filling with painter's chalk, then two coats of Cubist Gray. A difficult frame to paint because it had six 'reveals' (steps, with little sides and surfaces) and it's easy to leave what we always called in theater, 'Fatty Edges', (a void, where you missed a place, was called a 'Holiday'). Trade jargon is cool. Lunch, because we'd had the enormous Saturday morning breakfast burrito, was just a bowl of chili, with crackers, at the pub. And then we were right back at it, doing stuff that needed to be done. I finished what I felt I needed to accomplish, considering it was a day off; left at four o'clock, still had to stop at Kroger and get a few things, but, on my way home. There's a repetition to life, you make a pot of coffee, you shave, you look around for something to eat. The normal course of events. Harvey once told me, we were walking down around crow pasture, where Quivet Creek cuts through the marsh, he turned to me and said he couldn't do this, where anything was expected of him, that what he wanted was complete liberty. After a mere twenty years I understand what he meant. Now I just read body language and respond accordingly. Life, as we know it.