Late Wind

No rain, but a wind howling in off The Plains, that makes you sit up and take notice. The house shakes, it carries the load beautifully, through the beams down to a post. Designed with high wind in mind. Highest ridgetop in the county. More exposure than you'd ask for, normally, early homes are nestled in the hollows; the tops of the ridges reserved for graveyards and orchards. It's wild, a night like tonight, snapping branches like gunshots in the dark. I was napping, on the sofa, when a deep rumble came in from the northwest, like a freight-train, and the house bent under the strain. Oak is so wonderful in this regard, look at the way Viking longboats dealt with the sea, they literally ripple. I have to get up, the house is shaking, but I still have electricity, amazingly, and that blast, 60 or 70 mph wind, was the front of this new weather. Supposed to be nice, actually, and I look forward to that, but the immediate consequence is that a precarious pile of books falls over and I have to stack them back up. I have a very good LED headlamp that Howard sent me, and I'm sitting cross-legged at the bookcase I've fabricated from a defunct aquarium and some planks, it's not a handsome thing, Ellis Island, for books just entering the system. And it's a good thing, this windfall, because it allows me to see these books right now, and I might not have seen them for months otherwise. It strikes me, though, sitting thus, reading the titles and the authors out loud, with a headlight, that this could be considered strange behavior. I don't even know where these books came from. I process books. Real books, that exist in space and time. I organize them back into two piles, spines facing out. The top books in both piles are books that I want to read, and get them moved into the stacks, although the stacks are full. I installed a couple of bookshelves upstairs, and I'm moving collected works up there, all of Faulkner, all of Jim Harrison, all of Claude Levi-Strauss, which frees up several feet of shelves downstairs. This project is going well, except that I spend an inordinate amount of time handling books. It's my second favorite thing to do, after punching at a keyboard with two fingers (first finger of the right hand, middle finger on the left) and seeing what I remember. Pretty much a passion for me, now. The rest of the social niceties are meaningless crap, and I don't have any time for meaningless crap. Meaningful crap I have sufficient time for. One benefit of global warming is the opening of the Northwest Passage, a very good thing for China and Canada. I think about that for a while. A woodpecker flies into the scene I see, looking a little worse for wear, like he'd been beating his head against a tree all day. Completely dark, after nine at night, the kid, Travis, shows up with his foster dad or step-dad or whatever, and I almost shoot them. One thing you don't want to do is surprise someone who lives alone in the woods. The kid is fairly bright, but the father is dumber than a sack of rocks. I explain to them that I live alone for a reason and that I don't like being interrupted. They don't get the point, just want to use my phone, to see when Granny is picking them up in the morning. I have no patience with stupid people, may they rot in hell, purgatory isn't good enough.