Dried Morels

A great conversation with Linda, then Glenn, and it lifts my spirits, which were pretty much frozen. Their daughter, Margit, had dried a bunch of morels and didn't know what to do with them. I had some suggestions: an omelet, a cream soup to die for, and stuffed squid. Jesus, it's cold. Early morning and I start a fire, put on all the clothes I can manage. A few trips into the woods for frozen logs, split a couple, back inside, having a cup of tea, when a woodpecker I didn't recognize landed on a tree outside my writing window. A beautiful bird. Later, I walked over to B's cabin to ask him about it. He said it was a Red-Headed Woodpecker, quite rare in these parts. He's only seen three or four in forty years. On the way home I diverted into the woods to check out a disturbance in the snow, clearly where the fox had successfully dug a vole. A narrative spun in tracks and spatters of blood. I've watched her do this, so I actually know what happened at that particular spot in the woods. In so far as I can actually know anything. As I grow older I'm less and less certain. Given Brownian motion, and the fractal nature of things, patterns emerge, but they don't necessarily mean anything. They might, but not necessarily. Meaning, of course, being a relative construct. Specific ice crystals occur under specific circumstances, particular caterpillars might be more common in any given year, and there are cycles of rabbits and lemmings. One thing I know for sure, is that I never want Charlotte to be mad at me. She reamed the floor-cleaning crew a new asshole about the shoddy job they had done cleaning the main gallery floor. They had, she was correct, and they, after calling their boss in from Kentucky, agreed to redo everything they had done. Which is why I have to be at the museum on Monday, to make sure they don't seal food-gunk into the grout joints. In their defense, it is a very difficult floor to clean; but we're paying them a lot of money to clean it, and they had looked at the floor and given a bid, so the assumption was that they'd do a decent job. I had gotten to work early, yesterday, I think, so I could shave with hot running water; and she stormed in, full of vinegar, obviously having lost a night's sleep over the stupidity of other people, with a kitchen sponge and a butter knife. When the crew arrived, I was hiding out, upstairs, but I could hear the conversation, and she was a destroying angel. If they had ever had testicles, they were surgically removed. She used the sponge to clean up dirt, and the knife to dig crap out of the grout joints and put it in their face. Long story short, they'd never been called to task before, three guys spent six hours doing what two guys had spent three hours doing the day before. And it was well done, unlike the day before, when they thought to just get by with a shitty job. What bothers me is that these guys are supposed to be good at what they do. It's not incompetence, exactly, more just playing to the lowest common denominator. 'Clean' becomes a relative term.