December Now

Time flies. The average day takes twenty minutes. Sometimes quicker than that, the blink of an eye. Suddenly tomorrow. Awoke to voices in the yard, six guys in orange vests with guns. They're lost. Wondering where my cemetery was as they were supposed to 'start a drive' there. Others of their friends are in ambush two hollows over, where the church used to be. Hollows are logical funnels. No reason to go back to bed, just to be awakened when the shooting starts, so I make a pot of coffee and reread a brilliant essay on Louis Agassiz by Guy Davenport. You can't just read one essay by Davenport. So goes the morning. The two young squirrels seem to be denning together in a crude nest they've erected in a hickory tree. They're collecting a stash of acorns around the base of their tree. There are several families of coal-black squirrels, along Mackletree and Upper Twin Creek. Always startling to see one, it takes a moment to register. The fox is hiding out while the hunters stalk the woods. Me too, you couldn't pay me to walk in the woods during hunting season, even on my own property. I have "The Prague Cemetery", I think it might have been Umberto Eco's last book, though many more volumes of collected essays and letters are yet to come, and I just settle in with a mug of chicken broth and the book, after turning on the computer, on which are the two working documents: the file I'm editing, and the open file I send to you. Some little thing (breaking an egg yolk comes to mind, but in this case I don't remember what it was) set me off thinking about 'right' and 'wrong' which led me back to Wittgenstein, and that led to a few other things. A day like this, I often just graze on pickled things, cheese and crackers, open a bottle of wine, flip the breaker on the fridge, unplug the phone, and allow my thoughts to wander. A day alone with Black Dell is different from a day at work, but it is exhausting work, and I'm always amazed, when I wake up dazed, on a Sunday or Monday, from having read and written for eight or ten hours the day before, that I have to relearn how to walk.