Hail

Loud enough to wake the dead. The down side of having a metal roof. I get my candles ready, and the oil-lamp, but I'm about ready for sleep anyway. Hanging a complicated show like this is exhausting. Hell of a storm on the ridge last night and a great many trees down, on Mackletree. Hard rain, hail, high winds, and fifty percent of the leaves are stripped. I did almost nothing other than listen to the weather. Power and phone out almost immediately. A bit early for the first of these storms, but it does serve to indicate where we need to dedicate some time to improving the drainage by clearing the grader ditch of leaves and fines. B came over to talk about that, clearing the ditch, and we agreed on Sunday morning, because I'm staff, again, in the rotation of one, for Saturday duty, three weeks in a row. Fine with me, I have an enormous pile of books I need to read in the next two weeks, and I don't look forward to mucking out the grader ditch, but it must be done. Coming into town, all of the traffic cones are flipped on their sides. It looked like a battlefield, from which you had been protected. Never would have imagined. Those Bradford Pears are beautiful right now, and I'm engaged, the way scarlet goes to dark green. The verges, in the state forest, are completely unreadable, under banks of leaves; for a couple of miles the road is reduced to a single track. Ollie, Ollie in free. Everyone slows down, because wet layered leaves are a lot like goose shit, slicker than the sled you rode in on, and control becomes an issue. I've dealt with this my whole life. I'm comfortable enough with my own life, but I'd never foist it off on someone else. I have a pre-pain, where I know my muscles will be sore Sunday evening. Laugh as you might, there is a connection between the pain in my hip and the relative humidity. Phone is still out. Went in early, being the Saturday staff person, and did my grocery shopping before work. It being around the first of the month, Kroger is a zoo in the afternoon. Decided to re-hang the red dress piece, so get TR to help me take it off the wall, mark a new point several inches down, pull the old anchor, patch and repair, then set a new anchor. I take all of the packing material and boxes to the basement, then help TR set up chairs for the Sunday concert of Renaissance music. The mural painter, Robert Danforth (sketchy on that last name, but I hope it's Danforth, because it would be cool to be named for an anchor, but I think it's Dafford) and his significant other, Lilly, are in town for a few days, premiering a documentary of his work on the Portsmouth flood walls, and I walk them around. I'm not a fan of murals, but they're both interesting people. They're (Robert and the directors) thinking about doing a Carter mural on our wall in the alley. Robert wants to do this extended (it would be 60 feet long, starting at three feet high, expanding to eight) perspective thing, which would actually become quite abstract He realizes right away that I can picture what he's imagining, and he asks me to take a lot of measurements for him, which would be easiest done if I just drafted the wall, and I wonder who would be paying for my time. I can do it. I understand what he wants to do, but I'm not sure what my mandate is here. Either you hire me, or you do it yourself. I don't understand where the money for this project would come from, but that's not my bailiwick. I just need to know to what extent my attention is required. Then I'd have to decide whether or not I wanted to do it; always a question when you're independent, live in a tree-tip cave, and eat food that has been thrown away. I like playing second fiddle, there's less pressure. I find I'm less concerned about what anyone thinks. Growing older, nearly in my grave, I have no words of advice. Cicero spoke pure Latin. A fixed language, it's the vulgate bible that breaks new ground. The vernacular.