Solid Green

Encased. Walls of green. Ever changing needs. I can't even see a silver Jeep at a hundred feet. Fortunately I have these paths and I know where they go. Close quarters. The blackberry canes are a sea of white blooms. Electricity and phone out last night from a very strong squall that moved through in the afternoon yesterday. Read by headlamp. Asleep to the patter of another line of storms, then awake early this morning, coffee, morels on toast. D and I worked on the back hallway all day and might finish that up, except for baseboard (on special order), tomorrow. My last Saturday to work with D, next Friday is his last day. Funny exchange with Trish yesterday, she was asking me about next Saturday, the 25th, and was D going to work (he's worked most Saturdays, as have I, for the last three years) and I told her, that no, he wasn't, it had been clearly marked on the calendar for several weeks that the 24th was his last day. She was more concerned about who was going to work Saturday than she was about the chaos that will descend when D is gone. People amuse me sometimes. Pegi and Trish yell back and forth between their offices, which are adjacent, thank god, all the time; carry on complete conversations and balance budgets for grant applications in increasing frantic tones. I sometimes have to go outside and sit on one of the benches in the Esplanade. Roy Rogers, imagine that. It's the Roy Rogers Esplanade because he was born in the county. The coattails of fame. The Thai masseuse, was in the pub for lunch today, with some lady friends, in a line with me and the door, and I just really wanted to throw myself on her lap and talk about many things. She's so beautiful. I guess I do draw distinctions. One thing rather than another. I'm being engulfed, right now, in a sea of memories. The springs of the past. Tree-frogs, and now cicadas pull you around to cycles. One thing follows another. I could see the storm front moving in, went up to my office to check The Weather Channel and saw that we were going to get hammered before five o'clock, so I left work an hour early, and raced, like a bat out of hell, to get home, achieve the ridge before the rain. Got caught, just a mile from the driveway, in a downpour of marble sized hail, and thought I'd never make it up to the house, but I shifted into four-wheel low, 1st gear, and made it to the top, sat in the Jeep, in my parking place, a hundred yards from my back door, and read junk mail until the front moved through. I need to make it back to work tomorrow, for a few hours, to rough in the second bench in the back hall, then, I think, I'm hanging up the towel, fuck a bunch of beating my head against the wall. No one knows what sorrow.