For Amusement

Sitting at my desk, rereading some Guy Davenport essays, one of those late summer / early fall flies is bothering me, I finally swat it and it falls into the tangled web of a small spider. The fly is probably ten times larger than the spider, but as I watch, over the next hour or so, the spider manages to move the fly out of the catchments area into the home nest. Amazing. Comparable to me dragging home an elk. We've all watched ants do this, at a picnic, haul an impossibly large load back to the warren, but they often work in tandem, for the commonweal, spiders are solitary. An hour to move a fly carcass one foot. B came over, mid-morning to see if I was alive, brought a couple of tomatoes and a hand-full of fresh dug Kennebec potatoes. These are fine small potatoes, they have a thin skin and don't keep well, but they are wonderful rubbed clean, diced small, and fried. With an egg on top, a sliced tomato, and a piece of toast, a great meal. Back before Great Brit was an island, and Ireland was still attached, it was an oak forest of some note. Recently they found the remnants of an grove in the Irish Sea that were 90 feet to the first branch. That's a big tree. I had five acres of second-growth oak in Mississippi that were forty and fifty feet to the first branch, and those trees were a hundred years old. I never cut one down, but the succeeding owner sold the timber, right away, to cover what he'd paid me for the property. Re-planted the space in loblolly pine, generic white wood that grows at a staggering rate, several feet a year, and felt good about his investment. Bless him and the barge he rode in on. Paid our ticket to Colorado, where, other that some majestic Cottonwood on the banks of Spring Creek, we didn't have any trees of note. Up the canyon, to the south, I could see the first Ponderosa pines. In Colorado, elevation was everything. Our house was at 6500 feet, the canyon lip, above, was at 6800 feet. The Ponderosa pine started at 7000 feet and went up to the timber line, above 10,000 feet. A layer cake. I'd take a day-pack and hike up the canyon, late summer or early fall, miles were nothing then, just so I could rest in the shade of such a tree. Times passes, and I find myself alone in Ohio. where I have large trees again, poplar and oak, a hickory, fallen into the hollow, that would heat my house for a year, but I'm not going to haul that fucker out of there. Last year I heated my house with school chairs, the year before, with river wrack, this could well be The Year Of The Pallet, finding things to combust is not a problem. The problem, if there is one, is living alone; and it's not in the simple domestic issues, laundry and fixing dinner, it's in matters of intimacy. Some nights I'd rather snuggle, spoon, nothing overt, just physical contact. Temple Grandin solved this with a machine that pressed love through several layers of carpet. Maybe she was correct.