The Wittgenstein Plumber

I was cashed in, listening to the radio, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt. Joel called, we had shared many a crawl space, and he was worried about me, this from a guy on dialysis three times a week, waiting for a kidney transplant. I'm ok, solvent and coherent. Assuming I'll lose power, I start a crock pot of grits before I go to bed. Little or no accumulation was the projection but I'm not surprised to see more than an inch, when I wake up to a leaden sky at dawn, and it's supposed to snow all day. No wind, so all the branches are coated. Hearty breakfast of cheese grits with an egg on top, a second cup of coffee, and I'm right back at my desk, wrangling commas. Looking up, the word serene comes to mind. Two Cardinals fly into the sumac right outside a window. A male and a female. They're quite beautiful in the black and white scene. Went out to sweep a path across the back porch and steps and the fox was at the compost heap. She looked up at me rather coyly (I thought) and seemed in no hurry to move. I get one of the small local apples I keep for her, and toss it underhand to a spot about eight feet in front of her. She doesn't flinch, then trots over, daintily lifting her feet out of the snow. A little high-step dance. She carries the apple over to the woodshed and plops down under the overhang, holds it with her front paws, clamped to the ground, and eats away, glancing up at me occasionally. After a few minutes I realize I'm standing there, it's snowing, and I'm in house-slippers, my bathrobe, a watch-cap, long underwear and two pair of socks, and I don't want to take a chill. Back inside I take a bar-stool over to the back door and watch her, with binoculars, for another twenty minutes. She eats the apple entirely, then does a kind of break-dance, to dust off the leaves and snow, then heads back to her den, which is somewhere near the graveyard. Darker gray settles in from the west and it starts snowing harder. No accumulation my ass. Now that I'm retired, it matters less, especially as I made the run into town yesterday. Plenty of everything for a few days. Thursday and Friday it's supposed to get into the fifties and even to sixty degrees, with rain. The makings for a great morel season; and I think, for a while, about expanding the closest (and best) patch. This is hit and miss, but it can be done. You let a couple of prime mushrooms go to spore, then rake off the over-burden to expose dirt in an adjacent area, and thump on the chosen parent, upwind, to release a few million spores, rake them in lightly, and wait a few years. Since I know morels like the area, I'm reasonably sure I can extend their range. My legacy, such as it is: ten thousand books, five thousand manuscript pages, and a patch of morels. Just enough light to cast a shadow, and the snow starts releasing from the branches. The sap is rising, and the sugars provide an anti-freeze, so any slight gust of wind provides tree-snow, another prismatic event, and, aging hippy that I am, I watch with baited breath. It's beautiful, the panoply of light and sound. You can actually hear the creak of branches springing back into position. On the ridge, almost nothing is straight, the wind bends everything, if you want something straight, you have to go down into the bottoms. Big flakes falling now. Soon we'll be covered. I'd better go, now it's looking like heavy snow, and I'm sure to lose power. A parting shot, across your bow, why were you doing what you were doing, shuffling commas? I don't have a specific answer. There's a solution, I'm sure, but I don't see it yet. I'll leave you with that, welcome to my world.